CITY OF

WOMEN





REFLECTING


2019/2020

TABLE OF CONTENTS

UNIVERSAL BASIC JUSTICE, TEA HVALA

2

6 RECOGNITION

PRINCESS MARGRIET AWARD ACCEPTANCE SPEECH, TEJA REBA

7

THE ALIENS ACT, ALICJA ROGALSKA

10

THE ERASURE ANNIVERSARY: CRIME NEVER EXPIRES

24

26 REDISTRIBUTION

WOMEN, ART AND LABOR,

OR THE LIMITS OF REPRESENTATIONAL POLITICS, KATJA PRAZNIK

27

SOCIAL WORKS OF RESISTANCE IN

THE CITY OF WOMEN’S PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURES, osborn&møller

38





CITY OF


SOME ECONOMIC AND FEMINIST IMPLICATIONS OF

THE CHEESE AND CREAM PROJECT, KRISTINA LEKO

44





WOMEN


SHULAMITH FIRESTONE’S FEMINIST REVOLUTION:

A Conversation with Tanja Rener and Katja Čičigoj, ANJA BANKO

52

#8MarchEveryDay: Teaching Materials for





REFLECTING


the International Women’s Day

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64 REPRESENTATION

2019/2020

HEARING THE BODY: Interview with Nataša Živković,

TEA HVALA & TEJA REBA

65

POSITION OF A FEMALE MUSIC ARTIST IN SLOVENIA, IVANA MARIČIĆ

78

FEMINIST VIDEO ART IN SLOVENIA, ANA GROBLER

86

WOMEN AT THE MOVIES, BOR PLETERŠEK

90

“THE KEY IS THAT WE KEEP CHANGING PERSPECTIVES”:

A Conversation with She She Pop, ALJA LOBNIK

94

IN POSSE: Disrupting Patriarchy with Charlotte Jarvis, TEA HVALA

100

PANSPERMIA, SVETLANA SLAPŠAK

104

LIST OF PHOTOGRAPHS AND SOURCES

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TEA HVALA

citizens to perform seasonal farm work for less than minimum wage. And –





UNIVERSAL BASIC JUSTICE


scared of our organising strength – it is determined to block all further public spending on the already underfunded and feminised NGO sector.

From this perspective, it is quite ironic that the City of The 2019/2020 season of the City of Women started in October 2019 with Women entered 2020 with Burnout Aid, a European project the 25th anniversary edition of our largest event, the International Festival of dedicated to the prevention of burnout among staff members Contemporary Arts – City of Women, which hosted 160 guests and occupied and volunteers in non-governmental organisations. We will 18 venues in Ljubljana. This publication reflects on the selected artworks most certainly need it – next to national and transnational and viewpoints presented at the festival, as well as our ongoing efforts at feminist curating, advocacy, activism and education.

protests. It is also clear that a counterintuitive comparison between our culturally elevated work and the degraded, fem-The 25th festival edition was focused on #HerStory – wom-inised (un)paid care work as sites of economically devalued en’s history and the stories of contemporary women of all labour is in place, as Katja Praznik proposes in her essay genders. Our recognition of the missing or even deliberately Women, Art and Labor, offering a fresh perspective on pos-erased parts of general history was grounded on the premise sible alliances.

that historiography is a fight for interpretation – much like Our efforts for the recognition of the erased subjects of history and the the present, an anxious moment in history calls for a feminist adequate representation of women’s artists indeed need to be supplemented analysis.

by the struggle for redistributive justice – not in the form of breadcrumbs offered by the current Slovenian government, but in the form of universal City of Women: Reflecting 2019/2020 was compiled in March and April basic justice, starting with the universal basic income, advocated by soci-2020 when a third of the world’s population was caught in the global lock-ologist Tanja Rener at the 2019 City of Women festival: “I think the universal down. In many countries, the “stay at home” policies were based on class basic income is urgently necessary; we will, however, not get it, because in its segregation between workers who were allowed to protect their health by thorough implementation, it would outroot capitalism. Despite that, we must staying at home, and the people who weren’t, even though they work in demand it as soon as possible, otherwise the future will be even bloodier.”

non-essential industries. Slovenia was no exception. At the time of writing, it is the broken global supply chains, rather than the government, who are The City of Women English newsletter is published four times per year.

forcing the irresponsible owners of capital to freeze production.1

Stay in touch and subscribe.

Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic in Slovenia coincided with the formation of a new, right-wing government whose shock-doctrine measures are threatening to turn the country into an authoritarian regime. Fearing resistance, it has limited the freedom of movement to the municipality people are registered (but not necessarily living) in, curbed the possibility of ref-erendum and began to verbally attack journalists and media critical of its do-ings. So far, it failed to provide the army with police credentials. However, it managed to raise the wages of ministers while denying the already promised bonuses to overburdened public health workers. In the absence of legally Tea Hvala is a writer, translator and Deuje Babe Festival unprotected, easy-to-exploit migrant workers, it began to encourage healthy (C.M.A.K.) co- organiser, responsible for the City of Women’s arts and culture educational programs.

1 Cf. “Lilijana Burcar o geslu ‘Ostanimo doma’ in novi razredni segregaciji”, Večer, 5 April 2020, access 14 April 2020, https://bit.ly/2VjUVVO.

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TEJA REBA

PRINCESS MARGRIET AWARD





ACCEPTANCE SPEECH


In 2019, the City of Women Association was awarded the prestigious international Princess Margriet Award for Culture given by the European Cultural Foundation. As they stated, City of Women offers “a hopeful vision of democracy by redefining our understanding of culture and its capacity to improve a common European social reality”. The award was accepted by Teja Reba, the program director of the City of Women, who delivered the following speech at the award OGNITION

ceremony in Amsterdam on 3 October 2019.

Your Royal Highness,

dear European Cultural Foundation,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

REC

Good evening and thank you for this beautiful Award.

At this very moment, we are opening an exhibition at our 25th festival in Ljubljana, where a group of people whom we normally wouldn’t see at art openings, is present. I want to share with you a very short video preview of the new work presented in their company tonight.

In the video The Aliens Act, six people share their stories of erasure. In 1991, when Slovenia seceded from Yugoslavia, the Aliens Act created a legal void that was used in 1992 by the Ministry of Interior to erase 25,671 people, including children, from the register of permanent residents. The Erased had their existing rights arbitrarily withdrawn and were made illegal within their own homes. They lost the right to work and went without health insur-ance. Many were deported or forced to leave Slovenia. Despite being isolated from one another, the Erased managed to organize politically in 2002. They won their cases both at the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Slove-6

7



RECOGNITION

nia, which ruled that the act of erasure was unconstitutional and that their rights should be restored (1999 and 2003), as well as at the European Court for Human Rights (2012). The damage that the Erased and their families suffered still affects them and their legal and other struggles continue.

During her three weeks’ residency at the City of Women, the Pol-ish artist Alicja Rogalska, selected by a Danish and a British curator (osborn&møller), invited a group of Slovenian Erased to join her creation process and together research how to represent an identity

– or better said, a life – that was taken away.

They’ve created powerful costumes and I am on a mission to take those beautiful portraits back to where they belong – to the Slovenian and the European Parliament. Because, and let it be crystal clear to all of us, this is not about the past, it is about the future. Because at this very moment, thousands of people live in illegality throughout Europe, are being displaced, thousands lie dead in our sees, are beaten on our borders, are raped in our camps.

Maybe, and I am not saying this to sound more optimistic but rather to be able to imagine a future at all, and I quote here the Slovenian philosopher, the City of Women honorary president Eva D. Bahovec, we might need to collectively rethink our visions through the words by Virginia Wolf: “As a woman, I have no country. As a woman, I want no country.

As a woman, my country is the whole world.”

Thank you.

Teja Reba is a performance maker, the former president of the Contemporary Dance Association Slovenia and the current program director of the City of Women association.

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RECOGNITION

ALICJA ROGALSKA

I wanted to give voice to the people who were affected by THE ALIENS ACT

the erasure. We have obviously been hearing stories about it from those who have power, access to the media and the ability to speak publicly, such as politicians or experts. So I decided to invite people who directly experienced the In 2019, Alicja Rogalska was the City of Women’s erasure to share their experiences and their perspec-artist-in- residence, commissioned by the curatorial duo tives on the issue as a crucial part of the project. From the osborn&møller. In her research, Alicja Rogalska asked how beginning, it was a very collaborative process although I to represent an identity that was taken away. The artist and set up the structure. I invited the six participants to design the six erased people who joined her research talked about costumes that would represent their experience of the era-their collaboration in Škuc Gallery on 4 October 2019 at the sure. The idea of a mask or a costume as an expression of premiere of their video The Aliens Act.

identity is quite obvious and universal, but the way it was expressed depended on each individual. We had a series of workshops where we met, shared stories but also worked on Before I spoke to osborn&møller, I wasn’t aware of the erasure. At first, I was really reluctant to consider such a subject because I thought it was the designs that were produced with the help of my assistants too complex an issue to tackle in such a short time. Also, I was a stranger, Olga Michalik, Evelina Hägglund, Rosana Knavs and Nina just a visitor in Slovenia, which is a very specific position to be in. I started Čehovin, and the City of Women producer Eva Prodan. An researching other avenues, but I kept going back to the erasure, because the more I learned about it the more I realised it still needs to be talked about. To important part of the project was collecting testimonies from many people it seems like a closed chapter, or a historical issue, but actually the participants that formed the audio part of The Aliens Act.

there’s a lot we can learn from it, especially in the current situation with In the video, you can see the process of designing, making right-wing politics becoming more and more prominent worldwide.

and finally wearing the costumes.

I think there is always the danger of history repeat-

At the last workshop, photographer Lara Žitko took portraits of cos-ing itself if we don’t learn from those lessons. Many

tumed participants while Urška Jež, the executive producer of the City of people perhaps don’t realise how an administrative

Women, asked them about the meaning of their costumes. I am glad that the Erased agreed to include their portraits and statements in this publication.

legal act can be extremely violent and destroy lives in ways similar to other acts of violence. I’ve also I would like to thank again the participants for trusting me with their been investigating this issue in my other projects restories and joining me in this project. I have learned a lot from them.

garding law, such as the video What If As If (2017), where I worked with lawyers based in London who were also refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants, to

Alicja Rogalska is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice en-investigate legal fictions in the context of immigration compasses both research and production with a focus on social law, and I thought it was important to highlight it in structures and the political subtext of the everyday. She creates situations, performances, videos and installations, mostly in col-this project as well.

laboration with others.

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My costume is very stiff and white. While

the white colour is supposed to depict

bureaucracy and the fight against it, the

stiffness mostly represents the struggle

I have been facing for my entire life. Es-

pecially now that I have tried on my cos-

tume, I can see the parallels: it is difficult

to put on, difficult to take off and difficult

to move around in. It is as if I was somehow

imposed a limitation, which I was actually

submitted to in real life, with visas, certif-

icates, etc. It accurately summarises the

entire situation.

Anonymous



My costume represents a border, i.e. a

limitation of free movement. With it, I

wanted to show how a person feels when

their movement is limited. I am speaking

generally, even for the organised groups.

You feel strained, you have nowhere to turn

to, you are under surveillance everywhere.

Once you cut the wire and take it off, you

feel liberated. You wish for everyone to

be able to move and express themselves

freely.

Irfan Beširević



I’ve had my apprehensions about this cos-

tume, but now I think it is great. I even like

the pictures. I think the costume truly sym-

bolizes what I wanted to say: Beat me up

if you can. I am here. Made of concrete.

Hardened. Angry.

Mirjana Učakar



It seems that they managed to create a

costume in line with my sketch. Today,

I think it is good. The clocks on the head,

representing the time of erasure and the

anticipation of a solution, are like I had

imagined them to be. The chains and

the stone symbolise being imprisoned by

the problem, the fact that I could not do

everything necessary for living because the

erasure was too much of an obstacle. The

shield and spear signify that I am fighting

the erasure problem and defend myself

against attacks. Since my feet are tied, I

cannot defend myself, cannot move on,

cannot find help anywhere. I like to create.

Neisha Milkovich



Under the mask, I felt the same as I did

then. Invisible. Angry. Humiliated. And I

truly did feel like that. Thanks to every-

one, it was nice with you. It was really OK.

Thank you.

Slavica



My costume consists of the Slovenian flag

on the left side, and the Yugoslavian flag

on the right side. The flags are connected

by barbed wire while the face is masked,

posing two questions: who am I and what

is my identity? There’s a devil’s horn on the

head, symbolizing how the inhabitants

of former Yugoslavia are supposed to be

worth less than Slovenians, and there’s an

angel’s halo. Accordingly, the right foot is

bare while the left foot wears a red high-

heeled shoe.

Anonymous





RECOGNITION

THE ERASURE ANNIVERSARY:





CRIME NEVER EXPIRES


Collective statement written for the The Erasure Anni-

The historic moral of the erasure story is most evident-

versary: Crime Never Expires [Obletnica izbrisa: zločin

ly reflected in a part of the political nomenclature persisting

nikoli ne zastara ] event in Social Centre Rog in Ljubljana that this was not a crime, but simply an administrative error on 29 February 2020.

or even an ordinary and necessary procedure in the country’s independence process. This type of conviction persistently holds on to an intolerable presumption that the social exclusion mechanisms on the basis of wrong citizenship are a legitimate manner of organising society, along with the 26 February 2020 marked twenty-eight years since the erasure of 25,671

constant pushing of segments of population to the social inhabitants of Slovenia from the register of permanent residence. Almost three decades are now passing since the beginning of their innumera-margins, into poverty and exploitation. The normalization ble struggles to survive, re-establish the legality of their lives and compen-of such an exclusion from society incessantly produces and sate for the harsh social, economic, health, and other consequences of maintains new illegalised inhabitants thereby establishing a this illegal act perpetrated by the Slovenian authorities, which pushed regime in which the authorities set us in different categories the lives of tens of thousands Slovenia’s inhabitants into illegality.

on which our rights and humiliations depend. What unites The new anniversary marking the beginning of this crime the Erased and the people violently sent by the Slovenian po-simultaneously also exposes the long-term disclosure of di-lice across the border without any possibility of appeal today, verse dimensions of the erasure, as well as the long struggle are national authorities intentionally and systematically for its admittance and compensation for the injustices inflict-pushing their actions out of the fields of law, formal pro-ed. Furthermore, it reminds us of the liability of the entire cedures and rights, and into the fields of direct violence, line of employees in different public institutions who, by di-its concealment and denial. At the time of erasure as well rect acting under the authorities of the time, caused, support-as today, in the period of pushing people over the border ed, maintained and advocated the crime. In doing that, they by force, the mechanisms of the Slovenian state remain the never failed to fabricate excuses of democracy, European val-same, subordinated to the double objective of organising ter-ues and respect for human rights. In 2020, the fact remains ror on the one side and innocence on the other.

that, for many victims, the aftermath of the erasure is still not We must therefore, in spite of the unstoppable passing of time, remind over even though they might have established their formal ourselves again and again: erasure is a crime that must not be repeated. It status in Slovenia or anywhere else. Still, there are people is a crime that bears consequences not only for the persons who experienced living among us to whom the state has not yet adequately erasure themselves, but for all individuals who find themselves in the posi-granted this status even to this day. Thus, not only do the tion of illegality over and over again. And it is a crime for the society that by conceding to such exclusions maintains regulations through which consequences of the erasure drag on, but the Slovenian au-any one of us can become excluded.

thorities still keep on implementing the very same erasure.

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25





KATJA PRAZNIK

WOMEN, ART AND LABOR,

OR THE LIMITS OF





REPRESENTATIONAL POLITICS*


#1 Arriving in the City of Women

Almost twenty years ago, when I was still a student of comparative literature, I worked as a receptionist for the Slovenian Press Agency in Ljubljana.

While my main duties were to accommodate the coffee whims of journalists, occasionally answer the phone, or accompany a guest to an editor’s office, I spent most of my time reading heavy tomes of whatever novel was on the syllabus for a particular course, whether it be Russian Realism or Postmod-ernist Metafiction. Once the journalists realized that I could read and write, however, I became a kind of a reserve reporter in addition to their coffee fetcher. One day, faced with a shortage of journalists, the press agency’s editor of Arts & Culture desk asked me to attend and report from the press conference for the newly published integral Slovenian translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex. This event was my first initiation to feminist theory as well as an introduction to the City of Women, an international contemporary arts festival that started as a five-day festival in 1995 and just celebrat-ed its 25th anniversary in 2019. Since its beginnings, the festival has grown into a ten- to fifteen-day festival that every year hosts between forty to sixty women artists, theorists and activists. De Beauvoir’s translation served as the anchor for the symposium “Phenomenology of the Female Spirit” fea-REDISTRIBUTION

tured prominently on the sixth edition of the festival.

Back then, I was quite familiar with the condition of being the “second sex”. After all, I was a student at one of the most patriarchal and conservative departments at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana. During my tenure as a student in the late 1990s, neither feminist nor Marxist theory ever entered its curriculum. The predominately male professoriate in the department had a habit of uttering sexist remarks and disparaging women. On unusual occasions when something resembling vague feminist critique entered those classrooms, there would be a passing mention of a book on catholic misogyny written by Uta Ranke-Heinemann, a German theologian. Attending the

* This essay is based on a contribution that I wrote for the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the City of Women festival and was published in Slovenian language in the Journal for the Critique of Science. As such, it has accrued new intellectual debts: in addition to past and present members of the executive teams that have provided me important economic and historical data, I would like to thank the editor of this catalogue Tea Hvala for her guidance and comments, and my feminist comrade and theorist Carine M. Mardorossian for her incisive feedback.

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REDISTRIBUTION

press conference on the Second Sex and learning about the City of Women essay examines the contradictions arising out of the clash between the festival opened my eyes on a whole new level, which has surely been the politics of equal opportunities and the cultural politics that govern ar-case for many other young women for whom the City of Women has become tistic production in the underfunded independent art scene in Slovenia.

the place to engage with the politics of feminist struggle, and a platform to Regardless of the fact that the City of Women has not shied away from ad-discuss the perennial oppression of women.

dressing the questions of working conditions and has supported many artists that have tackled the problem in the arts and beyond it, the City of Women At the book presentation, I received a free press copy of the Sec-is nevertheless caught in the following contradiction (catch-22): while it does ond Sex and devoured the first tome instantly, especially the key important emancipatory work concerning women’s representation, if it does points of Beauvoir’s compelling argument about the social construc-not do so while accounting for the imbrication of class and gender, it can’t tion of gender. Her analysis of the reasons why I am perceived as escape the effects of economic subordination. The concept of invisible labor the “second sex”, and how social and cultural structures perpetuate is the point of entry for this issue because it is not only central to women’s these conditions, have permanently changed my perception and un-inequality in a capitalist mode of production but also because it defines a derstanding of women’s oppression. After that, my extracurricular pervasive form of labor exploitation in the arts. Does a festival initiated by a feminist education continued with other feminist readings and my liberal government agency in order to mainstream women in the arts impact regular and avid participation in events and projects organized by the gendering of the invisible labor of women artists or does it reproduce it?

the City of Women. The festival has not only taught me about feminist theory, but also offered a platform to engage with feminist politics beyond theory – it has showed me various ways of how to

#2 City of Women and the Legacy of Triple Marginalization practice feminist emancipation in my everyday life.

Since its beginnings in 1995, the City of Women festival has been in the Once I combined the feminist viewpoint with my postgraduate training grip of a triple systemic marginalization brought on firstly by the unequal in materialist sociology of culture, and analyzed the increasing exploitation position of women in the arts, secondly by capitalist economies, and thirdly of cultural workers in the non-governmental cultural sector, or more specif-by the festival’s situatedness in the non-governmental (NGO) cultural sector ically the independent art scene in Slovenia, in which we also find the City in post-socialist Slovenia. This sector’s cultural politics and ethos is histor-of Women festival, I inevitably concluded that this is a prominent realm of ically connected to the alternative art production that emerged during the invisible labor. I now saw the phenomenon of invisible labor as the par-time of Yugoslav socialism when Slovenia was still one of the six republics adox of art, that is the endemic condition in which the labor involved of the SFR Yugoslavia (1945–1991). These practices were not dissident art in art is neither seen nor defined as work let alone appropriately re-practices but were part of the socialist culture, even though they represent-munerated. Unpaid, invisible labor is a phrase that has historically evoked ed an alternative to the dominant bourgeoise commodity culture in its so-women’s work and, more specifically, domestic household work or the duties cialist version. While the limits of this essay don’t allow me to elaborate on associated with mothering. This is so true that the phrase “invisible labor” rethis history, what is important for this discussion is the fact that the actors quires no qualifier for it to immediately evoke the gender gap and women’s and the infrastructure of the alternative culture became the independent art unequal lot. In my work, I appropriate this rhetorical pigeonholing to reflect scene after the break-up of Yugoslavia and have been structurally deprived on the similarities and differences between the invisible labor that defines of access to public funding ever since Slovenia became an independent na-artistic production and the unpaid labor performed in the domestic sphere.1

tion state in 1991. In other words, the origins of the independent art scene The political economy of the City of Women of course offers an equally have little to do with the meaning that the notion “private non-profit prominent case to dissect invisible labor. Considering how the political econ-sector” may have for readers unfamiliar with the intricacies of the history omy of the City of Women has been marked by the economic subordination of Yugoslav socialism. Since all property, including cultural organizations in of women on the one hand and by unpaid labor in the arts on the other, this Yugoslavia, were legally public ( družbena) not state ( državna) entities, the terms of private property or civil society don’t really apply but they had consequences for when these entities were transformed during the transi-1  See, for example, Praznik, Paradoks neplačanega umetniškega dela: avtonomija umetnosti, avant-garda in kulturna politika na prehodu v postsocializem (Ljubljana: Sophia, 2016); Praznik, “Artists as tion from socialist welfare state to capitalist nation states. After the destruc-Workers,” Social Text 38, 144 (2020), forthcoming; Praznik, Art Work: Invisible Labor and the Legacy of tion of SFRY, these entities (called associations) became classified as private Yugoslav Socialism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcoming).

organizations as if they were not cultural commons and would need to be treated as such.

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The subordination of women under capitalism is the consequence of the you love, love what you do.” This ideology in turn hides vast swaths gendered division of labor: unpaid domestic labor or housework supports of unpaid or poorly paid labor in the arts. The social subordination and contributes to capital accumulation and valorization. The separation of of women coincides with the subordination of (women) artists and work and home that occurred with industrialization turned reproductive cultural producers – their common denominator is the politics of de-domestic labor or housework into invisible labor. As Marxist feminist Silvia valuated and unpaid labor.

Federici poignantly explained in the manifesto Wages Against Housework, this work is outside of the social contract, it does not count in economic terms The third marginalization of the City of Women festival is connected to and, most importantly, is not perceived as labor but as women’s natural call-the specificity of the Slovenian cultural system. Seen from the sociolegal and ing.2 The invisibility of domestic reproductive labor parallels the spec-the economic perspectives, artistic production in Slovenia is divided into a ificity of artistic labor. Just like the social construction of domestic labor public and an NGO art sector. The public sector is comprised of art institu-or housework as inherently female and as an aspiration of women subjects tions established by the national or local governments and mostly under-normalizes the invisibility of this work, in an equal fashion, the understand-written by public funding. The NGO or private art sector is comprised of ing of artistic labor as the result of the exceptional powers or faculties of freelance art workers and organizations that have to compete for public sub-a creative genius erases the notion of labor out of the arts. While domes-sidies to provide their public cultural programs. This division also affects the tic labor is degraded and artistic labor is culturally elevated, they are both distinction between two types of creative workers, those employed with economically devalued. Since artistic genius is racialized and gendered full benefits and social protection, and freelancers who are self-em-as white and male, the majority of artists, especially women, people of ployed with minimal to no social and economic security. The first type color and people of non-European descent are situated in a systemic set-prevails in public art institutions, the second is the hallmark of the independ-back of double oppression.

ent art scene. “The ultimate effect is that in order to survive the competition with public institutions, private institutions have to acquiesce to a greater The second subordination/marginalization of the City of Women internal exploitation of human resources, or in other words, perform the as an art festival dedicated to the promotion of women artists stems same work for less money and endure the risk of social insecurity. ”3 The from the disavowed economy of the arts – that is the presumed sep-bottom line of this division, which in Slovenia originated in the neoliberal aration of art from economic interests. The structural position of art policies that, after 1991, have deconstructed the socialist welfare state mech-in capitalism is often described in terms of the autonomy of the arts, anisms, is that public cultural organizations are the privileged producers of however it conceals the socioeconomic context of art. While the in-culture as a public good, whereas the agents operating in the independent stitution of art secures autonomy on the level of content and profes-cultural sector are understood as the producers of cultural services that are sional standards, it conceals the economic aspects of its production, ruled by the neoliberal entrepreneurial logic and laws of competition. They which is seen most clearly in the invisibility of the artist’s labor. Art are considered a sole enterprise on the cultural market and lack basic social as an institution, alongside its related forms of labor, is ideologically security and workers’ rights.4 Furthermore, freelance cultural workers who constructed in opposition to the dehumanizing aspects of labor in the work in this sector also often serve as outsourced cheap labor for the public factory system, as well as labor’s primacy in the economic sphere.

art institutions.

This makes artistic labor a form of invisible labor. The mystification of artistic labor – i.e. its historical attachment to the idea that artistic Slovenian cultural policy is clearly nurturing a familiar mythology ac-practice is not work but creativity emanating from an artistic genius cording to which “artistic production is ‘non-productive’ and, as such, ex-

– is central to the paradox of art. The disavowal of the socioeconomic cluded from the production of economic value.”5 However, this holds true context of art is most evident precisely in the omnipresent demand only for the creative workers producing cultural goods in public art institu-that artists and creative workers discount their labor or work for tions, whose work is protected by labor standards and includes social securi-free. In this context, too, work is most often defined not as labor but ty. Meanwhile the freelance creative workers of non-governmental sector in as vocation or calling, stemming from an inner need or inborn artistic talent. One is not doing it for the money or to secure subsistence, 3 Maja Breznik, Cultural Revisionism: Culture Between Neoliberalism and Social Responsibility (Ljublja-this type of work is rather done to the ubiquitous tune of “do what na: Mirovni inštitut, 2004), 67.

4 See Praznik, “Autonomy or Disavowal of Socioeconomic Context: The Case of Law for Independent Cultural Workers in Slovenia.” Historical Materialism 26, 1 (2018): 103–135.

2 Silvia Federici, Wages Against Housework (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1975).

5 Breznik, Cultural Revisionism, 50.

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culture, to which the majority of creative workers of the City of Women festi-temporary Arts and Feminism, arts educational programs and advocacy val belong, are treated as providers of cultural services and have to compete for equal opportunities for women artists. While national public funding on the cultural market on two levels: for their income and for the possibility for the City of Women has been meagre since 1996 (it fluctuates between for-of miserably subsidized social security that is based on the artistic merits ty and sixty percent of City of Women’s total operating budget), the breadth, of their achievements.6 The economic subordination of women here co-quality and international references and awards that the festival received incides with the problem of the unequally funded position of freelance as well as the constant growth of the number of events organized during creative workers in the independent art scene, that is with the inherently the festival and beyond are the result of the underpaid or discounted labor problematic inequitable division of artistic production and cultural policies of the executive team and other creative workers. This is especially visible in Slovenia. This inequity which contributes to class stratification of creative in comparison with the employees in the public sector of culture. Cultural workers is the key issue of hierarchically devised cultural systems, in which policy is thus interested in the representation of women but is not willing artistic production unfolds in entirely unequal economic conditions. What to support the City of Women’s aims to also become a producer of women then is the function of promoting women in the arts when the festival is sit-artists and create a comprehensive platform that would support the eman-uated in the non-governmental sector which relies on low or unpaid cultural cipation of women artists including fair economic and working conditions.

labor and precarious working conditions?

The attitude of cultural policy toward the City of Women is best described as an engendering of an appearance of openness and support for women’s equality. It is built on inequitable production conditions of a hierarchical

#3 The Gendering of Invisibility or Reproduction of Exploitation cultural policy and on the wings of an identity politics that obscures the class stratification of artistic production.

The history of the City of Women is specific to the context in which it was created, as a derivation of social policy intended for the promotion of gender The City of Women cannot escape the politics of invisible art labor which equality in the new nation state of Slovenia during the early 1990s. The fes-in turn unfortunately subjects women to two forms of economic oppression.

tival was initiated by a liberal governmental institution called the Women’s Firstly, it can’t help but reinforce the NGO and freelance state-sponsored Policy Office. The key issue, however, was that the festival (as a legal entity) inequity, and, secondly, within that level of economic oppression, there is came to be situated in the financially underfunded NGO sector, meaning that bound to be gendered oppression lurking even more. In other words, in the City of Women is an NGO organization. For the Women’s Policy Office highlighting women’s representation in the arts, the structural economic that financially supported the festival during its first couple of years, was subordination of women artists remains, and is entangled with exploitative later abolished and replaced by the Office for Equal Opportunities. While modes of production in the arts. While the City of Women is striving to secure the idea of promoting women in the arts was a worthwhile cause, the a production platform for women within the structurally underprivileged economic conditions for this endeavor were volatile from the outset.

NGO sector, it cannot escape the cultural double bind. Indeed, this issue is Structurally, the festival remained based in the underprivileged NGO sector not specific to the City of Women. It is a cultural and structural problem of that is the prime site of invisible cultural labor.

double invisibility (of women and artists) that is evident precisely in relation to the economic oppression that takes place despite the minimal gains of Today, the festival receives public funding both from national and city public funding for the festival at a local, national and European level. In this government, yet these funds are intended for festival events, while the as-sense, the City of Women cannot help but be an illustrative example of an ispect of artistic production of contemporary women artists has been margin-sue we encounter when identity politics lead to the perpetuation of class alized despite the City of Women’s efforts to offer a production platform for and economic oppression. We may think that, by virtue of being attuned to new works by contemporary women authors. Moreover, the City of Women the workings of economic oppression, one will necessarily address the ineq-is not merely putting up an annual art festival but also organizes work-uity at the heart of art production, but the subordination of class politics to shops, professional development, symposia, the Special Library of Con-gender politics remains unresolved even when minor gains have been made on the level of producing the festival. What happens despite the very best intentions and internal improvements of working conditions (i.e. the women 6 This is the case of the self-employed in the field of culture, a particular category of creative workers that can get registered with the Ministry of Culture and if their income is low enough, are entitled artists get paid, the executive team is employed via various types of projects) to subsidized social security. See Praznik, “Independence or Competition: Art Workers in Slovenia.”

is the unwitting reification of a competitive neoliberal logic that relies Serhan Ada (ed.), KPY Cultural Policy Yearbook 2016: Independent Republic of Culture (Istanbul: Bilgi on hyperproduction, self-exploitation and precarious forms of employ-University Press, 2017), 19–27.

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ment. Again, these are all larger structural issues affecting the arts in NGO

production that one festival cannot resolve no matter how hard it tries.

The emphasis on the representation of gender risks perpetuating a problematic class politics that then, ironically, allows gender oppression on the economic level to re-enter through the back door. This proves that gender oppression can never be addressed as a single-faceted issue. When the intersection of axes of power is not addressed (invisible labor in the arts and economic oppression of women), one form of resistance (making women artists more visible) risks resulting in the reification of another oppression (unpaid, discounted labor in the arts).7 While we are able to see women artists’ work, their labor as that of most artists remains discounted or unpaid, maybe more so than with men who may be less likely to suffer from a double form of oppression based on class and gender. In other words, the policies and practices of promoting women in the arts may take place alongside and be undermined by the socioeconomic inequality specific to the NGO sector and freelance art workers. Still, it is more likely for the City of Women to address this problem than other organizations less attuned to the workings of oppression. When we are beholden to issues of feminist emancipation and economic equality, they imply an open discussion and constant vigilance. They involve the kind of self-reflexive work toward re-dress that organizations such as the City of Women, which are committed to social justice, are more likely to address rather than to allow contradictions to go unnoticed.

7 For example, see Carine M. Mardorossian, Framing the Rape Vicitim: Gender and Agency Reconsidered (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2014) on how gender and race oppression work through and with one another in ways that make the workings of power both contextual and contin-gent but no less virulent for being so.

Katja Praznik is an Assistant Professor in the Arts Management Program at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Her research focuses on labor issues in the arts during the demise of the welfare-state regimes. She is the author of a forthcoming book Art Work: Invisible Labor and the Legacy of Yugoslav Socialism.

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osborn&møller

particularly unique to the social histories of this region, and which SOCIAL WORKS OF RESISTANCE

create platforms for collective questioning, imagining and testing of different ways of being together.

IN THE CITY OF WOMEN’S PAST,





PRESENT AND FUTURES


We hope Looking Back to Look Forward brings the archive to life, re-animating archival material for a new generation, as well as revisiting a number of original artworks generously made available to view for the limited time that the exhibition was online.

We were invited by the City of Women to reflect on the archive, Since 2017, osborn&møller have been researching and re-and we are very aware that our selection also reflects our particu-flecting on the City of Women’s distinctive approach to lar position in terms of age, experience, histories and geographies as well as our subjective interests as curators. There were many paths feminist curating, and the ways in which this resonates with we could have chosen to map our way through the archive, but for their own curatorial collaboration. The year 2019 marked the us two particular themes became important to follow: examples of culmination of their work, as osborn&møller curated a pro-women at the forefront of struggles against capitalism and the role of gramme for the 25th anniversary edition of the City of Wom-collective memory in poetic protest.

en festival. This included a solo exhibition and residency by Through our research, we noticed a prevalent relationship through artist Alicja Rogalska, an online exhibition entitled Looking

the City of Women programmes between a feminist critique and a cap-

Back to Look Forward and a conversation with Kristina italist critique, and the way that this offered a viewpoint to the changes Leko and Katja Praznik about different aspects of socially happening in the wake of Slovenian independence, including the rapid accelerations from socialism to capitalism alongside major structural changes engaged art and the working conditions of artists who cre-such as joining the European Union in 2004, just under ten years after the ate it. On this occasion, osborn&møller delivered a speech, festival began in 1995.

published here in revised form.

We notice this first in artworks that attempt to document rapidly disappearing local industries. For example, Kristina Leko’s documenting of the milkmaids of Zagreb when they came under threat of We are osborn&møller (Emma Møller & Mary Osborn), an independ-extinction from European standardisation, in her project Cheese and ent curatorial duo based between Copenhagen and London. Here, we will Cream Project, 2002–2013 (formerly known as Milk 2002–2003). Kris-be focusing on Looking Back to Look Forward, an online exhibition featur-tina Leko’s work became a seminal starting point in our research.

ing works from the City of Women archive as part of the Web Museum of MG+MSUM (Museum of Modern Art and Museum of Contemporary Art Me-In the same year, the festival presented Marija Mojca Pungerčar’s telkova), which we launched on 10 October 2019.

Singer (2003), an installation that transforms sewing machines into an instrument that “sings” with the voices of the United Slovene Wom-

Looking Back to Look Forward highlights works, artists and en Textile Workers’ Chorus: a chorus made up of laid-off and retired conversations from the archive that take a critical view on la-female workers from the then dying textile industry. It documents a bour conditions and gender equality in relation to the spread of past when singing was a part of the social and cultural life of nearly global capitalism, through collective action, poetic protest, and every Slovenian factory, and – in the words of Pungerčar – “brings solidarity.

rhythm to the body and helps to humanise the process of production”.

We are interested in the archive as a map of collective memory that writes its own history. We have selected works that speak to fem-Both of these works commemorate and make visible the women that inist art practices, narratives and realities that from our position feel were part of production processes, as a way of resisting the dehumaniz-38

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ing effects of globalisation. The effects of distancing techniques – such as very different viewpoint because even though today wom-outsourcing labour – we see accelerated today, with cheap labour moving to en are allowed – clearly because of the struggles they have unknown, faraway factories, cleverly removing the human connection from the process, so that people can consume without having to think of the la-made – to enter the world of waged relations in a more bouring body at work.

massive way, they are actually entering it at a time when the waged workplace has in fact been reduced to a disaster Over the next ten years, we see the effects of the changes prophe-sized by Leko and Pungerčar, as the City of Women programmes be-area: wage labour has been stripped from all the benefits gin to focus more on exposing new precarious labour conditions and that have been associated with it.

invisible labour. For example, ten years after the programme that featured Milk and Singer, in 2013, the festival presented an exhibi-Federici’s lecture has had a massive effect on us as individuals, and tion of Milijana Babić Looking for Work (2011–2012). We were really speaks deeply to our interest in feminist critiques which move beyond gen-lucky that Babić granted permission to include a lot of the original der equality into resisting exploitation on a wider scale.

artworks from that exhibition in Looking Back to Look Forward, including seven videos of her performing different types of work in-The second focus point was work that explored collective memory, cluding cleaning, distributing advertising, gallery invigilating, selling and the attempt to write women’s stories into history. We specifically irons in a department store, selling roses at nightclubs, waitressing, selected works that told stories of women’s experiences under socialism, and retail. In these videos, she makes the invisible visible, showing stories that spoke of equality, struggle and solidarity across the former Yu-us the labouring body in action. Babić’s end point for this project was goslavian states. The first example is Sanja Iveković’s video documentary to create a flow chart, evaluating each type of work based on efforts, Pine and Fir Trees (2002), presenting five women’s memories of life during outcome and income calculation, exposing the way that arts and cul-and under socialism. This video became something of a myth for us as we tural work is embedded in precarity.

tried to track it down – and it is with great thanks to the City of Women and Iveković that it was available to view for the duration of the exhibition. As We’ve also selected a number of talks which offer further contextualis-two individuals who were not taught the history of Yugoslavian socialism, ation around the relationship between feminism and capitalism, including a this artwork became especially important and eye-opening to us. It felt sadly lecture from Silvia Federici, entitled The Return of Primitive Accumulation rare to be able to learn history from the lived experience of women.

and the Ongoing War Against Women (2014), from which we would like to share this extract (transcribed from video):

Moving into the later years, we saw the theme of collective memory develop into performances in public space which sought to create living mon-One of the main elements of the capitalist attack on wom-uments and collective actions. This included Yugo Yoga by Lara Ritoša Roberts and I’m Walking Behind You and Watching You by Barbara Kapelj, Leja en in its first phase was the near expulsion of women from Jurišić, Teja Reba and Mia Habib in 2013, both of which embody a kind of wage labour. But today, we see the opposite in many parts poetic protest by taking up space with women’s bodies and critiquing the of the world, certainly in Europe, the United States, in Japan male dominated versions of history more commonly told. For example, I’m Walking Behind You and Watching You took the form of alternative guided and to a different extent also in Latin America. To a differ-tours and mass public ceremonies, asking, “if the Slovenian capital has as ent extent we seem to see an opposite movement. One of many as 360 monuments of local significance, what is the number of annota-the fundamental elements of globalisation has been the tions mentioning women?”

entrance of women into wage labour and, in fact, this has The way that the City of Women programmes write women into histo-been the source for many, many celebrations by neoliberal ry, and demand visibility and credit for these histories, is something that feminists and neoliberal politicians who look at globalisa-has inspired us since the beginning of our research. We are not only talking about the works presented in the festival but their whole approach to ar-tion as a process that actually emancipated women and

chiving – demonstrated in their inviting us to curate Looking Back to Look created the basis for a more egalitarian position. I take a 40

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Forward, and the Special Library of Contemporary Arts and Feminism which they opened in 2019.

To round off, what was important for us as a duo, was to see feminisms being used as tools for resisting structures of oppression which, looking forward, do not necessarily need to be restricted to gender binaries. Moving into the future, this means the fight for better welfare, radical new models like universal basic income, global public healthcare and a continued belief that we can collectively and creatively build our own value system that is not measured by capital.

For example, in Alicja Rogalska’s video work Onedera’s Dream, featured in the Kinds of Pressure exhibition we have curated for the Škuc Gallery for the 2019 City of Women festival, we meet Arifumi

– who is male-identifying – taking on a traditionally female role as a care worker for an elderly woman in Tokyo – Onedera. The conditions he is working under and she is living under are an example of neoliberal capitalism at work. The video also shows that “care” roles

– again historically associated with unwaged women’s work – are still not considered of value to the system. We see this video as a beautiful example of poetic protest. Alicja has previously been accused of exploiting Onedera by showing her in a vulnerable state, but Onedera’s wish to Alicja and Arifumi was to document her story to highlight the cracks in the system so that future generations may be able to continue the struggle for better welfare.

osborn&møller are Emma Møller (DK) and Mary Osborn (GB), an independent curatorial duo unattached to any one organisation, city or country. They are interested in performance as a practice that can disrupt structures of oppression, re-think hierarchies, illuminate the slippery borders between bodies, and offer a space for critical empathy and imagining.

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Kristina Leko

We started the Cheese and Cream Project as an initiative to protect SOME ECONOMIC AND FEMINIST

Zagreb dairywomen as cultural heritage,3 i.e. to secure their place on the market in times of severe economic decay of the Croatian middle IMPLICATIONS OF THE

class (their customers) and prior to Croatia entering the EU. Our project was





CHEESE AND CREAM PROJECT


launched in August 2002 by an action at Dolac, the central market in Zagreb where three milkmaids4 handed out cheese and cream to passers-by for free while young activists collected signatures in support of their demand that the city and state administration support their adjustment to the future EU

regulations by supplying financial aid, refrigerated points of sale, and alter-ing regulations when applicable.

The Cheese and Cream Project was presented at the City of Women festival in 2003 and again in 2019 as part of Back in 2001, it was clear to me that EU regulations (on top of surviving in the post-transitional economy) would seriously challenge the online exhibition Looking Back to Look Forward by dairywomen, primarily through new hygienic regulations about food osborn&møller. I am extremely thankful for that, for it mo-safety. According to the Croatian Agricultural Agency, in 2000 only tivated me to revisit the project. Currently, three young re-5%, and in 2002 only 20% of Croatian milk met the EU standards on searchers are evaluating the footprint of the project and the presence of antibiotic- and micro toxins (today, it’s 96%). Based on media reports and public discussions, it was also obvious that today’s position of milkmaids in Zagreb. The outcomes of the mainstream post-transitional politics (spellbound by capitalism) their research and a longer version of this text are going to would encourage the growth of local farms through bank loan in-be published on the sirivrhnje.eu website in May 2020.

vestment programs. On the other hand, these excluded small farms which couldn’t expand and reach the prescribed level. Only around 10% of the milkmaids’ farms qualified for the support programs available at the time.5

The Cheese and Cream Project (2002–2013) was a research, documentary and activist art project dedicated to – and partially realized in coopera-The public discussions on the EU and agriculture oscillated be-tion with – Zagreb dairywomen. These women commute to Zagreb once to tween fears about production quotas and daydreams about big subsi-three times per week from the surrounding areas (as far as 100 km away) dies for ambitious agrarian entrepreneurs. I remember the feminist to sell their milk products on a number of open markets in the city. Fresh realisation hitting me: kumice6 will be left out. Before our little cheese with cream ( sir i vrhnje) is their main product. It is also a tradition-media campaign drew attention to this, nobody noticed the market al North Croatian meal and an important ingredient of the local as well as women and their households which function in the grey economy some regional cuisines. In the last two or three decades, the cash flow and and are based on the invisible and unpaid labour of (to a great extend the presence of farmers on Zagreb’s twenty-three open markets dramatical-elderly and female) family members.

ly declined.1 Multinational food- and milk industry corporations, tied with supermarket chains and the aggressively introduced shopping-mall culture restructured Croatian agriculture and food market. The number of Zagreb 3 This somewhat romantic and provocative request was formulated in the Declaration of Milkmaids dairywomen dropped from ca. 550 in 2002 to ca. 200 in 2020, while their in 2002. In 2004, I filed the request with the Croatian heritage protection authority, but they haven’t turnover dropped 75%. Most likely, their number will decrease a further 50%

processed it due to formal obstacles.

within the next five years.2

4 All of them have been working there; Katica Bzig from Bregovlje for 57 years, Marija Spoljar from Donja Bistra for 55 years, and Marica Seničić from Jakovlje for 44 years. The products were paid for by our project funds. The action was part of UrbanFestival 2002, organized by BLOK (http://urbanfestival.

blok.hr/).

1 Since the early 1990s, farmers on Zagreb city markets were progressively replaced with sellers 5 I made a documentary project On Milk and People (2000–2003) which comparatively showcased five who mostly sell imported goods, as Croatian agriculture and food production, let alone other indus-Croatian and five Hungarian milk-farming families in a series of experimental documentary short tries, were shut down by the war in 1991–1995, followed by privatization and the flourishing of im-films, because of which I was familiar with the dairy sector. I portrayed small farmers as the paradig-port-based economy.

matic losers of the transition.

2   Data collected from the city-owned Zagreb Communal Markets Company; the estimates are mine 6 Kumica is an endearing name used for women who sell any kind of food, including dairy products, and based on field trips in December 2019.

of their making on the market.

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As an artist, I conceived the Cheese and Cream Project and, in its myself why this “factory” wasn’t saved even though the conditions for doing first phase (2002–2004), it was realized as a joint venture with cu-so were met: there was public attention and support for their cause, their rator Vesna Vuković and the project team affiliated with [BLOK] –

product, cheese with cream, became the symbol of Croatia joining the EU at Local Base for Cultural Refreshment. Later, I continued on my own.

its own pace, which also empowered the local slow food movement … Why Between 2002 and 2004, we operated at the intersections of art, activ-didn’t it work, then?

ism, and sociological or cultural and anthropological research. Our project encompassed several actions or interventions in public space; When I started the project, I was dreaming about the city admin-a field research with questionnaires answered by 448 milkmaids (re-istration paying bonuses or cultural heritage fees to the dairywom-sulting in statistics on their socioeconomic situation); a database of en, about fancy refrigerators, and about my photobook and website dairywomen from the six main city markets; a website promoting the being regularly updated and marketed for the benefit of the ageing businesses of 474 milkmaids; a collection of customers’ stories and milkmaids. Why didn’t I continue? Why didn’t I accept the offer of their signatures of support; an exhibition followed by a panel discus-the Municipality of Zagreb and got myself employed, if only tempo-sion where state- and city officials were called to take measures; and rarily, as the town’s expert advisor on dairywomen?

a small media campaign which introduced the problems of dairywomen to wider TV-audiences. After 2004, I occasionally exhibited Although in 2007, the mayor made a public promise that the city artworks from the project, created a documentary (2007–2013), and was going to supply refrigerated points of sale, the cheese and cream edited a reader.7 Our project brought public attention to the cause trade was banned because there were no refrigerators when the EU

of the dairywomen and encouraged some of them to self-organ-regulations came into force in 2010. Three days later, the ban was put ize, which was crucial later on as it helped them to organize and on hold, thanks to a well-organized protest of the dairywomen and protest together.

negotiations with the authorities. The refrigerated vitrines were put in place a few months later. However, they were poorly designed and In 2003, Vesna Vuković, milkmaid Višnja Čukelj and I spent a the lower storage shelves emitted heat with temperatures up to 47°C.

day at the Ljubljana market as part of the City of Women festival.

In the summer, a dairywoman had to absorb that heat in her legs, We talked with women who were no longer traditional dairywomen8

and bring along portable cooling chests with ice, all of which made because they gave up on production and became dairy saleswom-her work even more difficult. After a mere couple of months, many en for big farms. As we collected support signatures for the dairy-vitrines were malfunctioning, and until this day, they haven’t been women of Zagreb, there was a moment of understanding, burdened repaired since the company that produced them was dissolved soon with difficult questions. Why would you fight and argue for more after the delivery. Most likely, it was established just a few days be-hard work? In other words, why organize and produce, why com-fore that public tender was published which is a common corruptive mute and sell; why get only four hours of sleep? Because it gives practice of Zagreb’s city administration.

you agency and money as well as the power and the right to say and act as you think is appropriate. Of course, not all dairywomen On their end, state administration failed to adjust the regulation are emancipated the way I would define it, and some have abusive of the perimeter within which trading unpackaged farm products husbands, but going to the market has traditionally been a way out was to be allowed. Only once it was clear that the regulation made of economic dependency and related abuse. It is a rare site of wom-the majority of dairywomen operate illegally, did the office responsi-en’s power created within Croatia as a traditional patriarchal society, ble begin modifying it. Along with other similar handlings, this repre-regularly listed among the top countries in femicide rates in the EU.

sented the structural and intentional administrative oppression of dairywomen.

The 550 dairywomen who, in 2002, “employed” one or more family members to supply forage for cows can be compared to a factory of 1500 workers I started photographing dairywomen in 1998, and my first artwork that who support at least 2500 people. For a vast majority of milkmaids’ families, came out of it was a double slide projection showing two series of portraits the open market income was the only cash at their disposal. I keep asking taken within two hours on 29 February 1999. On one side, it featured portraits of policemen who were preventing an anti-government protest from happening and showing off their massive presence on the streets of Zagreb; 7 Documentary film Cheese and Cream (40’, Factum Zagreb, 2013), Book on Milkmaids (Otvoreni lik-ovni pogon: Zagreb, 2010–2020).

on the other, portraits of dairywomen on a nearby market. The same old 8 Slovenia entered the EU half a year later, on 1 May 2004.

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boring binary opposition followed me throughout this project, especially The Reception of the Project and Its Legacy

while working on the documentary. The administrative frame imposed on the dairywomen – the market clerks, the state, the city, and the county offi-At the 2003 City of Women festival, our project presentation cials – they were all male.

was part of a program about the impact of globalization on women’s struggles. The most appropriate frame for the Cheese and Cream Project would be anti-globalization, even more so feminism, but the responses to the project from those contexts were – with some pre-Dairywomen and the Class Division

cious exceptions – very ambiguous. I felt that a few progressive women whom I deeply respected, looked down on it. Perhaps because I I was a teenager when my grandmother (a dressmaker and small never declared myself feminist even though I have always worked private-business owner in times of socialism) introduced me to the with women and dealt with women’s issues in my work? In addition, dairywomen. For me, like for so many other people, their fresh the progressive, politically engaged curators from the former Yugo-cheese with cream made out of raw milk was my petite madeleine.

slavian region I’ve been in contact with rarely considered showing Each fresh cheese had a unique taste. It was thus not only possible the project, unlike the curators who were unfamiliar with the region.

to differentiate milkmaids through taste, but you could theoretical-Why is that?

ly trace a taste to a specific cow, which is an important ecofeminist thought, if we want to rethink our human–animal alliance. And since On the other hand, it was fascinating to see how a similar cross-class the vast majority of people in the Yugoslavian successor states still solidarity, like the one that existed between ladies and milkmaids, began to nourish their rural roots due to the relatively late industrialization spread though the wider public in Croatia in the course of our activist art and migrations to urbanizing areas after 1945 (and very much in the project. Because of that, I began to see the dairywoman as a traditional 1960s), there is more to it. For me, the taste of cheese with cream role model who could challenge the local patriarchy by transforming stimulates an immersion into an in-between world where classes themselves, the “traditional” rural women through these new alliances.

merge in their historical dialectic, in between the urban and the But I got cold feet. I was afraid that I would unintentionally play into hands rural, and through specific female bodies at that.

of conservative patriarchy.

When you see an overdressed town lady exchanging her mon-In fact, in February 2004, BBC made a reportage about Marija ey for products with farmer women on a Zagreb market, and hear Ivanković, one of the younger and stronger milkmaids. They took them talk about children, husbands, health and finances, you often our project narrative and information and twisted it. They portrayed notice a sparkling alternating current of solidarity and identification the dairywomen (together with the whole nation) as backward vic-between them. For example, the fine urban lady might still have par-tims and future losers – and it was me who supplied the contacts, all ents or grandparents living in a remote village, while the daughter of the necessary background information, and organized the shooting the dairywoman works in the company where the lady used to work.

for them. Several months later, a Croatian former journalist found-They identify across class lines, which they, in a way, tend to undered his political party in the right spectrum. He then started his eu-stand as temporary, coincidental, irrelevant markers.

rosceptic campaign entitled Cheese and Cream – again, stealing our project narrative but this time, putting a strong anti-European prefix But, hey! What am I doing? Romanticizing Croatian dairy-to it. He organized give-away actions of cheese and cream in public women, who are, to a good extend, conservative churchgo-space just like we did, but instead of working with the dairywomen, he worked with bigger, industrialized farms. Later, charges were ers? You know what that means when it comes to women’s, or pressed against him because of money laundering, particularly in in their terms, the nations’ reproductive rights.

relation to his cheesy give-away actions. He lost elections, while we, intimidated, gave up on our cheese-and-cream activism.



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For the progressive women who grew up in Yugoslavia, it is difficult to embrace and give credit to any kind of “traditional”

woman’s role model because we always see it as a reactionary opposition to the modern, socialist, working-class emancipation.

In other words, any “traditional” or rural woman is by default a conservative nationalist, and any apolitical communication (outside the safe, anti-fascist and/or socialist ideological frame) might be dangerous, therefore it should be avoided. In other words, if you are (or want to be) a progressive feminist, do not mingle with churchgoers.

In conclusion, I feel that the legacy of this project is in its somewhat sub-versive agenda of pulling out a “traditional” women’s role model in order to challenge and shed light on our division lines. I still think that powerful examples of “traditional” female roles exist and that locally they could be helpful in challenging patriarchy. My family, which has been quite matri-archically organized for three generations, is among them. There will be no transformation or dismantling of systemic patriarchy without trans-gressing class as well as ideological lines and other lines of division. The progressive left (feminists) cannot do that job alone. This is why I say: create new alliances and believe the impossible …9

9 “Believe the impossible!” was the concept and slogan of the 2003 City of Women festival.

Kristina Leko is a participatory artist and activist. Since the late 1990s, she has initiated and realized several extensive community art projects in different countries. She uses a variety of media spanning from drawing or text to research, from film and exhibition-making to interventions in public space. Her main focus is social interaction and (self-)empowerment.

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How come the publisher /*cf. decided to translate The Dia-

SHULAMITH FIRESTONE’S

lectic of Sex? In what way does this book place itself among the FEMINIST REVOLUTION

ranks of translated feminist works to Slovenian language?

A Conversation with Tanja Rener and Katja Čičigoj

Tanja Rener: How come? Because it is a feminist classic.

Katja Čičigoj: We are lacking translations to Slovenian language in several fields, thus missing classics as well as con-In The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution temporary works. This translation has filled a certain void.

(1970), Shulamith Firestone advocated for a feminist revo-In the /*cf. publishing house’s Lilac series, there is a transla-lution that would not merely question privileges, but over-tion of Virginia Woolf which represents a key contribution.

throw the very material bases of sex-, race- and class op-Furthermore, The Second Sex is translated to Slovenian, and pression. Her utopian manifesto has rarely been taken up in although it is a linear construction, I see The Dialectic of Sex subsequent feminist theory and philosophy, which tended as the follow-up of such feminism, given that Firestone uses to gravitate towards more situated, heterotopian modes of Beauvoir as a direct reference. In addition to the translated thinking rebellion. Recently, however, several voices have works from American feminism of that period, we are also called for a more ambitious, systemic approach to gendered lacking literature from France, Italy and other countries, which we are even less familiar with.

oppression and revitalised the imagination of radically different futures. Some of these voices (Pia Brezavšček, Katja Tanja Rener: An additional reason explaining how come Čičigoj, Sophie Lewis, Victoria Margree, Chrys Papaioan-Firestone had to be translated precisely now is more political.

nou, and Anamarija Šiša) could be heard at the interna-For a while now, we have been facing a very thorough social tional symposium Imagining radically different futures:

amnesia, which in our country refers to the former regime.

The Dialectic of Sex and feminist utopias today in October Certainly, it was full of flaws, yet I feel that we threw the baby 2019 at the 25th City of Women festival.

out with the bathwater. We tend to forget that, during socialism, we had universal social rights and also feminism The symposium was organised by the City of Women, Book-as one of the numerous political movements and strug-shop Azil (ZRC SAZU) and the /*cf. publishing house. The gles. I think that this amnesia is not spontaneous, but instead latter released Katja Čičigoj’s Slovenian translation of The Di-orchestrated to the point where capitalism seems like a nat-alectic of Sex in 2019 and is planning to publish the contri-ural state or even “biology”, as Firestone might have put it.

butions to the symposium in 2020. The festival programme On the other hand, experience and referential areas are being erased along with the erasure of history and memories, also featured the screening of Elisabeth Subrin’s film Shulie which means we are again doomed to find ourselves at the (1997), followed by an online conversation with the direc-very beginning. It is, in my opinion, very good that Firestone tor and a discussion with Katja Čičigoj and Tanja Rener, a has been translated, for we can thus see what had once al-member of /*cf.’s editorial board, about the “dangerous” uto-ready existed, the struggles that have been implemented, and pianism of Shulamith Firestone. The conversation was led by we can check whether these struggles are still ours. In that Anja Banko.

sense, I see her work as relevant even today, although it has been surpassed in many aspects, as Katja Čičigoj critically points out in her afterword.

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What is Shulamith Firestone’s relationship with the Europe-She says this could help end waged work, while automa-an space, considering that she is an American radical feminist?

tization could also mean the end of reproductive work as



we know it. UBI and automatization are thus, according Tanja Rener: In The Dialectic of Sex, the most renowned to Firestone, tools that would bring on the humankind’s feminist slogan personal is political is at work all the time.

liberation from waged and reproductive toil, that would Today, we can prosaically translate it as the fight for a wel-enable much freer sociality and creativity. This is a very fare state which has never existed in the United States. The radical vision of social change, again becoming active right USA did not have state feminism, as we did, they did not have now in some theoretic circles, such as the Italian post-work-free access to abortion, childcare, universal healthcare and erists and their successors, or the younger generation of femi-so on. My relationship towards socialism is not nostalgic. I nists, for instance xenofeminists who see technology as a tool do, however, think that Americanisation has made us lose for crucial changes to the economic as well as gender system.

or is making us lose one of the rare comparative advantag-Within the context of the United States, this very aspect of The es we used to have as a former socialist state and as part of Dialectic of Sex dissolves the stereotypical image of radical the European continent, which has formed the welfare state feminism. The left wing often understands it as separatism even in the West after WW2. Meanwhile, our country is now or exclusive occupation with women, leading to mysticism also discussing some kind of a “lean government”. I am even and worshiping some “female” values, and, today, it is gladly more worried by the horrifying modifications of mentality dismissed as some kind of reformist “identity politics”. How-that have made us change our attitude towards the welfare ever, radical feminism in the USA sprang up in a very tight state to the very point where we stopped perceiving it as connection with with leftist politics and the counter-cultural a fundamental achievement of civilisation, but instead stugggles of that time, and it established itself as a radical left treat it as something good for the losers. The fact that we critique of the new left. This is exactly what Firestone writes fell for this trick is very problematic especially from the fe-about. She does not criticise the left for being too radi-male or feminist viewpoint, and we have to move away from cal, but because it is not radical enough, because it fails it. Although Firestone tackled neither the welfare state nor to tackle reproduction and sex. It was not about rejecting the universal basic income (UBI) in these particular terms, the class struggle and the Afro-American fight for civil rights.

she does say at one point that it should be introduced, for it Instead, it was about trying to join those struggles and si-is quintessential for any kind of freedom, starting with re-multaneously making them look in the mirror.

production rights. In stating that, she is intensely up to date, and I feel we need to discuss this. I think UBI is urgently necessary; we will, however, not get it, because in its thorough What are the problematic aspects of the feminist revolution implementation, it would outroot capitalism. Despite that, we proposed by Firestone?

must demand it as soon as possible, otherwise the future will be even bloodier.

Tanja Rener: Firestone set her feminist revolution into the far future. As a sociologist, I think that by doing that, she Katja Čičigoj: True, Firestone is incredibly up to date.

missed the point, because she failed to notice that smaller She sees the universal basic income as something that would scale revolutions are already at work: educational, employ-enable women and children to become economically and

ment and sexual in the sense of separating reproduction existentially independent of men and grown-ups, while the from sexuality. She wanted to go a step further and separate workers, male or female, would be independent of capital.

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er, this is precisely the point where I am not convinced. She Katja, how would you define Shulamith Firestone’s style of proposed transgenerational and transgender communal life, writing, her language and the translation difficulties you had to where the ties would not be biological but woven in line with face?

affinities. But a huge problem appears here. To be a little bit blunt: what to do with people whom nobody likes due to their Katja Čičigoj: Firstly, I must stress that The Dialectic of Sex affinities? Besides, affinity means hard work and is short-is written out of the movement and for the movement. It is term. Also, Firestone never explicitly states what a biological not an academic or scientific work but is instead written as family is, even though she keeps on attacking it from all sides.

the all-encompassing theory of gender oppression, which is Even though I have had a lot to say against family in my life, simultaneously a political manifesto and an advocacy of I think she is mistaken in this point, since family has changed the feminist revolution. Firestone poured numerous intel-after 1968.

lectual sources from which she drew her thoughts into her prose without referencing every other word, as we are used I think that the 1968 movement fell apart as a cultural revo-to when writing professional articles in our days. This was lution because nothing really changed in the broader picture, the reason why the editor Amelia Kraigher and I have decid-none of the systems were shaken, not even a little. However, ed for me to add references to her writing – in order to bring what did shake was the private sphere where pluralisation of her work and its context closer to the readers in Slovenian forms of family and ways of life took place. Something very language. The biggest challenges for me while translating unusual happened to families. Of course, they remain mur-were most certainly the search for sources and the contex-derous institutions. Families certainly do kill. But on the tualisation of references, however, I think that this is exactly other hand, families are the only bastions of communism what opens the possibility of scientific and research analysis at this moment. Where else do you have common property, of the book. It also brings the Dialectic closer to a wider con-where else do you have empathy and solidarity that wriggles temporary readership.

away from the law of the market? I do not claim that this goes for all families, but it is an impact of the cultural revolution of 1968, one that Firestone perhaps failed to notice.

Katja Čičigoj: I think this is exactly where the problematic whiteness of her feminism comes to the foreground. Black feminism’s reproach to white feminism was precisely the oversimplified rejection of family. In the period of slavery, family was for the large part of black population the only en-Tanja Rener is a sociologist and emeritus professor at the vironment without severe exploitation. Although Firestone at Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana. She has one point concedes that family is compliant with the “natural published widely in the field of women’s studies, family and youth studies.

needs” for closeness and safety, so we are unable to say that she denies any function of the family – she does ask how we Katja Čičigoj is a philosopher, lecturer, writer, translator could change this institution for it to be less murderous.

and dramaturg. She is completing her doctoral thesis on feminist philosophy at the Justus-Liebig University in Giessen, Germany.

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#8MarchEveryDay

Teaching Materials for the International Women’s Day On 8 March, the City of Women annually prepares teaching materials for parents, youth workers and teachers who work with young people between the ages of fourteen and twenty. By structuring a 45-minute lesson entitled #8MarchEveryDay, we encourage them to address the social, political and economic causes for gender inequality, but also celebrate women’s achievements and learn about the long history of struggles for women’s rights.

Despite their connection to the International Women’s Day, the teaching materials are appropriate for any occasion. In 2020, they take the form of a quiz, following the favourable response of teachers to the 2018 and 2019 quizzes. The teaching materials include the quiz questions as well as the correct answers with explanations and discussion cues for each question. The participants can take the quiz by forming groups and competing against each other. Their active participation is the objective of both the quiz and the discussion held after it.

The 2020 quiz was prepared by Ana Čigon, Tea Hvala, Urška Jež, Amela Meštrovac and Teja Reba. It encompasses fifteen questions on the general knowledge of young people and expanding their aware-ness of important historic and contemporary heroines, the already acquired women’s rights and the fields where gender inequality is still or ever more pressing.

The teaching materials are in Slovenian and can be accessed here:

www.cityofwomen.org/sl/content/vsakdan8marec If you want to know more, if you are interested in translating the materials into your language or would like to disseminate them as part of your activities, contact: tea.hvala@cityofwomen.org.

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HEARING THE BODY

Interview with Nataša Živković

ATION

Nataša Živković is a dance maker, performer, choreographer and mentor from Ljubljana with a rich history of artistic collaborations and solo performances. Her debut First Love’s Second Chance, produced by the City of Women in 2009, and her dance- and theatre achievements won her the 2009

Golden Bird Award. Her most recent solo piece Sonny, produced by the City of Women in 2018, explores the history of women, male supremacy and strategies of female empowerment in the Balkans. In 2019, Sonny won the main ACT

Award at the ACT Festival in Bilbao for “the impressive interpretative work in different records, both physical and textual, and the strength that history transmits us”. In 2019, Nataša Živković also received the Ksenija Hribar Award for her out-standing achievements in the field of contemporary dance.

In this interview, conducted by Tea Hvala and Teja Reba, Na-REPRESENT

taša Živković discusses the process of making Sonny.

You developed Sonny between 2017 and 2018 when you teamed up with other dance makers (Roberta Racis, Koldo Arostegui González, Jija Sohn, Sophie Unwin, Hannah Buckley) in the two-year programme Performing Gender – Dance Makes Differences.1 How did the two engage-ments intertwine?



Being surrounded with people who think about, are sensitive to or experience different aspects of gender-related issues on a daily basis has been very valuable to me; it made me more sensitive and aware of those issues, whether they concern the lives of transgender people and people who define themselves as non-binary or women’s rights and feminism; how gender is related to history, class, capitalism and the socio-geographical map. At a cer-1 Performing Gender – Dance Makes Differences was a cooperation project of Il Cassero/Gender Bend-er Festival, City of Women, Centro per la Scena Contemporanea, Paso a 2, Theaterfestival Boulevard, DansBrabant and Yorkshire Dance, supported by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

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REPRESENTATION

tain moment during the project we were asked to write down what we were element to them, which I really enjoy. I see these discussions as a different working on, what our interest was at the time. That was very useful for me way of opening an artistic work to the audience and taking the topics since I had to pin down my theme. I chose to research the phenomenon of they tackle a step further.

the sworn virgins of Montenegro, Albania, Kosovo and Metohia. I used this research both for the workshop I later gave to young dancers in Leeds, and Which creative procedures were important for you in the process of for my solo Sonny.

making Sonny?

Sonny speaks about the privileges of being a man, and questions the na-During the Performing Gender training weeks, when I was beginning to ture of women’s power, freedom and choice to become masculine in the Bal-shape Sonny, I met a number of artists who influenced and inspired me pro-kans by taking on a man’s role. I use the stories of the sworn virgins as an foundly – Oona Doherty, Liz Aggiss, Eva Viera and Amy Bell. Also, some entry point to rethink the history of women, male supremacy and strategies discussion with dramaturgs and producers, such as Tanya Steinhauser, of female empowerment in the Balkans, to further ask where are we today.

Laura Kumin and especially especially you [Teja Reba], helped the piece Does a woman still have to deepen her voice to be heard? Does she have to grow.

to wear trousers if surrounded by men in suits? How do we perceive authority and power?

For example, English dance maker, writer, curator and teacher Amy Bell suggested finding a specific word, a metaphor for what we are doing and What are the activist aspects of your practice, way of thinking or researching in order to pin it down and – at the same time – open new possi-approach?

bilities of imagining and understanding it. When I was researching the phenomenon of the sworn virgins from the Balkans, I came across an interview My activism stems from a feminist position, so I am trying to understand in which one of them said: “Wearing a man’s suit is a privilege”. A man’s suit how to connect these multiple positions to feminism. How to think about is a metaphor I found helpful in my research process. It can mean different transgender and non-binary positions from a feminist perspective, how gen-things and evoke different associations: my father, something that doesn’t dering happens through language, how different genders are perceived in fit, weddings, funerals and other social rituals, cross-dressing, etc.

specific cultural, geographical and historical context? And: how is gender intrinsically linked with power as well as class and race privilege? To me, It is also important for me to ask why we move our bodies, what is the one of the most important conclusions during the Performing Gender project vehicle behind a certain kind of energy; it’s not only about the movement was that it is not something that should be enclosed within the identity pol-for the pleasure of moving. Sometimes, I feel that dancers are somewhat cut itics discourse. Instead, discourses about gender are traversed by all of the from delivering speech because of the fact that our main tool is the physi-above-mentioned elements.

cality of the body. I am not only interested in seeing, but also in hearing the body. I am interested in how to better connect the rational of the mind I think I can talk about activism on stage when I feel that what happened and the supposedly irrational of the body. For me, these two aspects are in-had a real impact on me and the viewers; that something is going to stay tertwined. The action of giving voice back to the body is therefore an with them and make them reconsider their own position. Generally speak-

“un-muting” action also in a political sense.

ing, though, I would prefer the term “political” to “activist”. For me, “political” carries more meaning, in the sense of “the personal is political”. The politics or the bio-politics of our daily lives needs to be addressed again In the two years of touring and nineteen reprises, Sonny reached and again if we want to influence and promote change, also at the level over nine hundred people in Slovenia, Montenegro, North Mac-of state politics – for example, by promoting laws that benefit homosexual, transgender and non-binary people as well as single mothers, nonconven-edonia, Spain (the Basque Country), Croatia and Serbia. In the tional modes of parenting, etc.

post-pandemic future, the City of Women hopes that Sonny is going to reach audiences in Kosovo, Germany, Lithuania and I hold moderated audience discussions after Sonny, and I find it amazing again in the Basque Country. If you want to bring Sonny or any how people are open to speak about gender issues. For me, it feels almost like other recent City of Women production to your town , contact another performance, or let’s say that these discussions have a performative Eva Prodan at: production@cityofwomen.org.

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In her performance Sonny , Nataša Živković offers an insight into one of the most paradoxical examples of transferring gender roles from biological principle to social status. Her research of sworn virgins, dubbed virdžine (in Montenegro, Albania, Kosovo, and Metohia), is primarily concerned with the astonishing repression of patriarchal dictature on the abovementioned territories (addressing girls by the generic male name sine , sonny, is only one of its symptoms). In those areas, living conditions are best for those women who totally abandon their biological signs, only to proceed transferring into the male social role until that very role actually exceeds them and becomes their true reality: the virdžine adopt and assume the diction, behaviour and habits of men, they also change their looks, so as to become respected, almost revered in the name of the “higher purpose”. Thereby, a society exclusively founded on the heteronorma-

tivity imperative, which absolutely rejects any form of queerness,

faces an outline of a paradoxical knot of ideology that interiorizes

its own patriarchal logic to such a point where it totally misses the

“conflict of interests” . As a result, this society produces an absolute, full-blooded queer situation, one which it otherwise despises and prosecutes outside of the context of its own laws.

In the performance, this commentators’ layer is put on by three trans-vestites (assistants), whose relation to the main actress on the one hand represents an inverse proportion to the newly established gender (male to female), while on the other hand, they trigger a move from the distant environment to here, to our space, which enables the integral, global LGBTQ+ problematization to truly commence. In the second half, the performance gradually begins equalizing the declar-ative and the physical levels; Nataša Živković’s body is becoming a

tool, an appliance, a material that no longer wishes to define itself

in any (gender) direction, but is instead eager to communicate

through its movement and visual “intersexual” potential, where her image and choreographic implications keep on catching the double gender depiction – however, they do so with an intention to annihilate both of them in order to create a being who does not adapt to outer conventions, who wants to manifest their own policy of their own body, independent of tradition and ideologies.

– Zala Dobovšek



Florentina Holzinger: TANZ

a woman’s skirt. And we know about patrons

who supported ballerinas’ dance careers “for

In ballet, the art form created centuries

a little bit in exchange”. So, I was looking for

ago by men over women’s bodies, the ques-

a way to show how this dance tradition has

tion of representation of women’s bodies is

culturally shaped women’s bodies, but also

highly important. We know about Parisian

to shed light on some problematic practices

bordellos and the Paris Opera where wom-

in today’s ballet.

en’s bodies would be exposed to male

viewers who liked the idea of peeking under

– Florentina Holzinger



Flora Détraz: Muyte Maker

Muyte Maker celebrates disobedient and

irrational bodies. It examines joy as a physical and existential statement: joy as desire and

creative potential, going against the grain of

morality, and as a physical distortion or con-

tradiction.

– Flora Détraz



Olja Grubić: Naked Life

I see the images brought on by

in front of their genitals. It seems

the impacts of male domination

as if they would keep on scraping

for several millennia; captured,

until the end of all time, until they

ecstatically masturbating fore-

succeed in unbalancing the founda-

bodings of Erinyes who, in their

tion of the entrenched patriarchal

excited, repetitive pleasure, ever

structures; however, they do seem

more wildly scrape zucchini and

more and more tired performing

carrots, naked, preferably in the

this Sisyphean deed.

pose where they hold the scraper

– Urban Belina



Bara Kolenc: Brina

“Women came up with contemporary dance

even before this geopolitical territory introduced universal suffrage, and as such, contemporary

dance primarily signifies a practice of emanci-

pated female creativity.”

– Rok Vevar and Amelia Kraigher





REPRESENTATION

Ivana Maričić

differences in time periods, as well as economic, social, POSITION OF

sexual and race differences.





A FEMALE MUSIC ARTIST


Katarina Juvančič cut through the shy touches of darkness surrounding IN SLOVENIA

the topic of women in music when she triggered further debate by realistically illustrating the everyday work of a precarious cultural worker. She thereby accentuated the class differences among sound artists and added that she cannot afford to be on sick leave even during her second cancer treatment. Larisa Vrhunc and Urška Pompe, on the other hand, have finan-The public panel Position of a Female Music Artist in Slovenia was part cial security as university professors, yet their regular jobs do not neces-of the European project MusicaFemina

sarily allow enough free time for music art. Moreover, they are not given 1 at the 24th City of Women festival in

2018. The panel was conceived and moderated by sound artist, violin player, a chance to lecture on composition but teach music theory instead. In such electronic musician, poet, literary artist, radio editor, sociologist and also the circumstances, creative work is neglected. Statistic data confirms that com-25

posing alone is not a sufficient source of income. In Slovenia, the 2018/19

th City of Women festival artist in focus – Nina Dragičević. She was joined by visual artist and harp player of the younger generation Urška Preis; vo-season gave room to approximately 2% of works by female composers on calist, dancer, choreographer and philosopher Irena Z. Tomažin; composers the two central stages for classical music (Cankarjev dom, Slovenska filhar-and university professors Larisa Vrhunc and Urška Pompe; anthropologist, monija), while the rest (98%) were composed by their male colleagues. The music journalist and singer–songwriter Katarina Juvančič; and retired Slav-statistic research by Nina Dragičević for the 2018/19 season is also valid for ic-language professor, poet and folk-song singer Bogdana Herman.

the 2019/20 programme of the leading music institutions. This information triggered a lighted debate focusing on the issue of women’s quotas.

The starting point of the debate immediately revealed the Women’s quotas were actually first addressed by composer Urška existing common problem of misogyny; however, it was also Pompe, who sharply criticised them since, in her opinion, they rep-evident that the speakers hardly recognize it as their own resent a bad trend, are a “terrible promotion of women” and shift issue. It is true that Bogdana Herman illustrated the some-the focus from quality to quantity. She further vaguely connected the what careful remark about a lot of women in music being problem of contemporary art and music to the question of money: in overlooked and forsaken with her own example: in the past Slovenia, the artwork accomplished today does not sell, and if it does, twenty-five years, music critics have neglected to mention the sums are very low. Out of Urška Pompe’s shift in focus, money her with a single word despite her creative endeavours of quickly transformed into one of the leading motives of the conversa-several decades. But the opposite viewpoint was immediate-tion about women in music.

ly presented by Urška Preis, who feels she is positively discriminated in Slovenia due to her youth and gender, which

“Where there is no cash, we are all the same,” 2 claimed she managed to gain profit from by quickly releasing a solo Slovenian improviser, composer, musician, vocalist, flute album. The different treatment of the two women from dif-player and publisher Maja Osojnik in 2019. The question of ferent age groups alone calls for an intersectional approach whether poverty truly makes us all the same had already to the analysis of the position of female music artists. The been raised by Nina Dragičević at the panel. True: contempo-intergenerational difference proves that the integral un-rary (academic) music in Slovenia is not profitable, yet in derstanding of the problem demands more than simply its creation as well as re-creation, the absence of women observing exclusively gender differences, but also the still remains painstakingly obvious.

1  MusicaFemina is a project of maezenatentum.at, City of Women and Gryllus Kft in cooperation with 2 Tomaž Grom: “Maja Osojnik: ‘Since When is Being Female Considered a Genre?’ – Video Interview”,

Heroines of Sound supported by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

Centralala.si, 30 September 2019, access date 20 February 2020.

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REPRESENTATION

On the other hand, Irena Z. Tomažin claimed that the non-institutional-of the artwork and the “criticism of inequality”5 hidden in it are to ised and fragile field of experimental improvised music knows no gender be observed through the activity of the (sound) artist. This does not differences. Nina Dragičević quickly found that, nevertheless, it is useless to mean that every (sound) artist is a feminist, but with her artistic look for solidarity and sensitivity regarding the musical genre, as the Slove-act, she definitely inscribes and describes her (female) position.

nian festivals of experimental and/or improvised music (Sonica, Sajeta) are far from reaching the quotas. A year later, Irena Z. Tomažin gives an interAt the panel, Katarina Juvančič called for solidarity and co-opera-view3 with a more detailed explanation, saying she was lucky that her male tion, Irena Z. Tomažin saw her purpose as providing support for oth-colleagues were feminists. One should not overlook the fact that the institute er women, maintaining a safe and open space where there can also Zavod Sploh (under artistic direction of Tomaž Grom), the largest organiser be room for self-criticism, Larisa Vrhunc and Urška Pompe swore to of concerts and other events in the fields of experimental and improvised use their last drops of energy to compose new works and will not music in Slovenia, regularly addresses the problematics of discrimination, allow themselves to stop, while Urška Preis wished to see the institu-striving to integrate all marginalised and socially vulnerable groups (mi-tions open to new music currents and more female role models. The grants, refugees, the elderly, cancer patients, unemployed, mental patients, latter are few, in some fields none, but not because they would not etc.).

exist – they have simply been kept invisible.

In their respective interviews, both Maja Osojnik and im-Therefore, Nina Dragičević’s two calls at the panel bear even more improviser and jazz pianist Kaja Draksler4 emphasise that they portance: firstly, she called for compiling an inventory of personal stories do not feel gender differences as much in respect to their of female (sound) artists that reflect systemic inequality. Secondly, at the male musician colleagues as they do in relation with concert panel as well as in her lecture entitled Seeking the history of women sound creators in the area of former Yugoslavia,6 Dragičević called for a redefini-event organisers. The latter often underestimate them, tion and expansion of the meaning of basic notions within sound arts.

often pay less than they would to their male colleagues, This is the only way that the thought about sound can become inclusive.

and also try to flirt with them. Therefore, the organisers Thus, composing is no longer reduced to facultative male academic groups, and institutions creating the musical mainstream are for but also encompasses sound qualities produced by women who, through-them (and also for Irena Z. Tomažin) the principal sources in out history, lacked access to the dominant music currents. Her clear critical producing gender inequalities. So finally, they all pledge their thought thoroughly discloses the institutional lie about equal opportunities.

support to the quotas, given that they force those holding the It questions the very scientific apparatus that constantly causes harm by con-positions of power to lend an ear to the different, i.e. female cealing the violence of the established discourse.

voices.

5  Tomaž Grom: “Nina Dragičević: ‘Feminism isn’t About Hating Men, it’s Pure Criticism of Inequality’

However, as Nina Dragičević had already warned at the pan-

– Video Interview” , Centralala.si, 19 October 2019, access date 20 February 2020.

el, this is not a problem of quotas, but of a class difference. What 6   The lecture was part of the symposium Feminism in Sonic Arts at the 25th City of Women festival does this mean for the relation between women and music? Nothing (2019) within the framework of the MusicaFemina project.

else than the fact that gender difference is inscribed in our bodies, social roles, position of (the lack of) power and impact on the (re)creation of music as a woman. “Women’s writing” is not to be sought by way of essentialism, but through understanding the circumstances of the creation of an art product, while the emancipatory potential Ivana Maričić is currently studying for her MA in musicology at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana. She is active as a music journalist and archivist, writer of concert programmes and organiser of 3 Tomaž Grom: “Irena Z. Tomažin: ‘If Anything, Being Womanly Means Being on the Side of the Weak’

– Video Interview” , Centralala.si, 4 November 2019, access date 20 February 2020.

contemporary experimental improvised music concerts.

4  Tomaž Grom: “Kaja Draksler: ‘About Identity, Being in Shape, Groups, Gender and Quotas’ – Video

Interview”, Centralala.si, 1 July 2019, access date 20 February 2020.

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Nina Dragičević: Extensions of Pleasure

The composer asks: Is pleasure really a

romantic, sensual feeling, as it is conven-

tionally understood? Or is it rather a point

of disembodiment and destruction in its

most constructive sense, as well as a carri-

er of unsayable consequences which derive

precisely from its audibility? In that regard,

is it not crucial to know that the composer

of pleasure is a woman, or perhaps even two

women?

– Nina Dragičević



REPRESENTATION

CHEERS TO WOMEN!

Exhibition, Performance and Film Marathon

In celebration of the 25th City of Women festival, curators Vesna Bukovec and Ana Čigon looked at the twenty-five years of creative endeavours by female video artists in Slovenia. Their exhibition Cheers

to Women! 25 Years of Film and Video included a selection of works by twenty-five female authors chosen from the vast video production of numerous authors.

Artists: Zemira Alajbegović & Neven Korda, Nika Autor, Vesna Bukovec, Jasmina Cibic, Ana Čigon, Andreja Džakušič, Ana Grobler, Marina Gržinić & Aina Šmid, Đejmi Hadrović, Maja Hodošček, Sanela Jahić, Neža Knez, Polonca Lovšin, Aprilija Lužar, Nika Oblak & Pri-mož Novak, Ana Pečar & Oliver Ressler, Nataša Prosenc, Marija Mojca Pungerčar, Pila Rusjan, Duba Sambolec, Zvonka T Simčič, Nataša Skušek, Metka Zupanič, Valerie Wolf Gang

Most of the works were presented in the Alkatraz Gallery, others were shown on the big screen as part of the marathon of Slovenian female film directors and video artists at the Slovenian Cinematheque, curated by Varja Močnik. At the same time, the national broadcaster RTV

Slovenia paid tribute to Slovenian female directors by screening their films.

The exhibition was opened by Ana Čigon’s peformance Cheers to Women! A Performative Appetizer to Video Art, dedicated to video art created between 1995 and 2015 by Slovenian female video makers.

Along with guided tours, the public programme featured a lecture by artist and curator Ana Grobler, who has been researching feminist art in Slovenia for more than a decade. Her lecture focused upon the social context in which video art with feminist tendencies was produced after Slovenia’s transition from socialism to capitalism in 1991, as well as the significance of taking a feminist stand in an art scene and society that continues to exclude and misrepresent women (artists).

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REPRESENTATION

Ana Grobler

The European Commission’s 2018 report on equality between women and FEMINIST VIDEO ART IN SLOVENIA

men in the EU shows that in 2018, as many as fifty-five percent of people in Slovenia felt that the most important female role is to take care of the home and the family. In these conditions, it is especially vital to talk about (queer, lesbian and trans-) feminism, publicly declare ourselves feminist and I like to think I have a good overview of the feminist art in Slovenia, even include LGBTIQ issues into art. We thereby contribute to the loosening of the though it is hard to monitor all productions today given that, at the end of patriarchy and fight for a better position of everyone or, in the worst-case the first decade of the 21st century, feminist thematics began to appear in scenario, at least for the maintaining of the existent rights that are by no artworks more intensely. Only ten years ago, it was hard to find artwork means self-evident.

with the word feminism in its description. In comparison to the mainstream media, where the word feminism is often omitted, the explicitly feminist ar-Female (video) artists also contribute to this struggle. Many tistic commitment is now better recognized in the world of art. However, among them express themselves through various media, which numerous public institutions (especially those that do not engage in the arts) shows that feminist artists have always been very resourceful.

still have apprehensions when it comes to the use of the word feminism.

Given that throughout history they had always been set aside, to the margins, they were the first bold enough to try out new media, even During the 1980s and 1990s in Slovenia, many new wom-though they were looked down upon. In doing that, the artists were en’s groups were formed, in addition to the lesbian and gay

– and remain – economical, not only due to lack of financial means, movement, which had a meaningful contribution to the grad-but also because their means of expression has often been their own body, since the objectification (of oneself and others) is most effec-ual introduction of feminist fine arts criticism, aesthetics and tively shown on one’s own body.

history of arts, as well as more lively events in the field of art.

While the works of Duba Sambolec, especially her sculpture Unfortunately, the fact still remains that artwork produced by Women are coming! [ Ženske prihajajo! ] from 1976, was a sol-men is more appreciated and that artwork done by women rarely itary endeavour in the age of total gender inequality in the finds place in museum collections. For instance, despite the general arts, the 1980s saw several artworks connected to the activ-conviction that the works bought by American museums in the past decade included more artworks produced by women, in the article ist inclinations of the female artists (Aprilija Lužar, Marina

“Women’s Place in the Art World” (2019) artnet.com states that their Gržinić & Aina Šmid, Zvonka T Simčič).

share rose only to eleven percent. It is true that there are other solutions to this than implementing quotas, such as drafting a strategy to In 1991, feminism became more visible mostly due to the first women’s sell off works by canonical authors and using the acquired finances demonstrations since the Slovenian independence – the demonstrations to buy artworks by female artists, yet, it helps if the head position of managed to maintain Article 55 of the Slovenian Constitution, regulating the the museum is occupied by a woman. Judging by experience, it is not right to freely decide on childbirth. Later on, the reasons for feminist art in much different in Slovenia, therefore we are also facing the need to Slovenia appearing more frequently can be attributed to the events accom-seek new strategies and solutions in our country. It is precisely the panying the transition towards a neoliberal market economy, mostly to the artistic and activist feminist strategies that essentially promote these rise of the right-wing politics, which, in the name of the re-traditionalisation endeavours.

of gender roles, began to harbour more and more appetite for the hegemo-ny over female bodies as well as gender- and other minorities, promoting Although I announced that, in my lecture, I was to expose key feminist hatred on the basis of sexual orientation, identity or other individual cir-video artworks from the mid-1970s until today, I am unable to do that. For cumstances. All of this brought on a more active artistic criticism towards me, all artworks are of key importance, since every single work pro-the system and the expansion of feminist art. An even larger feminist social motes the recognizability of feminist viewpoints in public. This does not activation was triggered by the politicization of the assisted reproduction only apply to the works by video artists, but to the entire feminist artistic procedures, finally resulting in the discriminatory act still in force today al-production, even documentary, to the work by female theoreticians and the lowing the procedures only to heterosexual women in marital or non-mari-contributions of activists and collectives, even though they might only have tal relationships.

created a single feminist video work. Therefore, I am expanding the list of 86

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female artists included into the exhibition Cheers to Women! 25 Years of Film and Video with the artwork produced by some other individuals, male and female, and collectives that have helped make feminist video art in Slovenia more visible.

Martina Bastarda, television art performance TV dražba [TV Auction], 2003

Zvonka T Simčič, video Lezbični poljub [Lesbian Kiss], 2001

Marija Mojca Pungerčar, video Javno zasedanje [Public Session], 2001

Tadej Pogačar & The P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Museum of Contemporary Art, archive video CODE:RED, prvi Svetovni kongres spolnih delavcev in Novega parazitizma [CODE:RED, I.

World Congress of Sex Workers and New Parasitism], 2001

Marina Gržinić, Aina Šmid, Zvonka T Simčič, video film Razmerja. 25 let ŠKUC-LL

[Relations. 25 Years of the Lesbian Group ŠKUC-LL], 2012

Vstaja Lezbosov [The Insurrection of Lesbos’], video Homo-Risk, 2008

Vstajniške socialne delavke [Uprising Social Workers], video performance Slavoj kuha čaj [Slavoj Makes Tea], 2015

Lezbično-feministična univerza [Lesbian Feminist University], video Lezbično-feministična univerza v akciji [The Lesbian Feminist University in Action], 2014

Lea Culetto, video (Brez) [(Without)], 2017

Rebecca Reja, video Izgubljene povezave [Lost Connections], 2018

Lana Zdravković / KITCH Ona, video performance Kako ona uživa: golo branje Lacana

[On Her Pleasure: Naked Reading of Lacan], 2007

Evelin Stermitz, video Table Talk, 2008

Nina Baznik, video document of performance Etiketa [Label], 2017

Slađana Mitrović, video Koža Special [Skin Special], 2007

Vita Žgur, video Abortus, 2005

Maja Slavec & Michele Drascek, video performance Women Beauty Power Less, 2008

Urša Vidic, video As One, 2008

Ana Grobler is an artist, curator and artistic director of Alkatraz Gallery (KUD Mreža). Her research on feminist art in Slovenia has led to several co-curated exhibitions. She is a member of the spol.si on-line portal editorial team and participates in the Red Dawns collective.

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Bor Pleteršek

and Media History at Birkbeck College provided a brief historical overview WOMEN AT THE MOVIES

of relevant studies in the field before moving on to the findings of one of the most important empirical studies of cinema audiences to date: a UK-wide survey of public attitudes to film published by BFI in 2011 under the title Kinodvor’s International Conference at

Opening Our Eyes.

the 25th City of Women Festival

Dana Linssen’s reflections The Mediator Is the Message – Or is She? were based on her practice as a film critic, editor and mediator. A critic has a vital Issues of representation, the work women do behind and in front of the role in reaching audiences, she contends. But with a recent change in per-camera, quota, malpractice and abuse in the film industry ... are all common spective, she found herself in a new position from where she can speak up topics of discussion. But one subject remains, as it were, doubly obscured: and take a stand. This coincided not only with movements like MeToo and female spectatorship. Talks on women and cinema tend to focus on what we Time’s Up but also with a major shift towards a more personal writing (“The see on screen, rarely on audiences. Yet when it comes to quality art-house

‘I’ came back.”). Concluding with a warning about the re-emerging trend of cinema, women have come to play a significant role in maintaining and

“typecasting critics”, she maintained that female critics should write about promoting the movie-going experience. The conference, organized by all films and that gender balance in criticism finds more resonance with Kinodvor in cooperation with City of Women, addressed women’s movie-go-audiences.

ing practices and started a debate on audience development by bringing together distinguished international film professionals to look at women at the Cinema producer and curator at Cultural Cinema Watershed Tara Judah movies in different periods and contexts.

presented the notion of “curatorial activism” and a number of initiatives in the UK that aim to bridge a historical gender gap in representation. This culAs shown by Judith Thissen, Associate Professor of Cinema History at tural shift in curatorial approach hopes to hit an annual target of between the University of Utrecht, in her presentation Ladies Kindly Remove Your 50–60% of female-identifying audience attendees. In the absence of data on Hats: Female Movie Fans in New York City and the Making of a Mass Medium, gendered audiences (in mainstream, as well as in the independent sector), women were vital in turning the new film medium into America’s favourite she presented two case studies from Watershed, both from their Cinema mass entertainment in the first decades of the 20th century. Substantial ef-Rediscovered festival. The programmes illustrated that the higher the per-forts were undertaken by early exhibitors to “clean” attending picture shows centage of films directed by women was, the higher the share of women of the negative associations of most other forms of social entertainment, cre-in the audience was.

ating a public image of cinema as “polite entertainment suitable for women”

in the process. Many of the early female spectators were in fact work-Head of Program Koen Van Daele shared information on female audi-ing-class girls, employed by the city’s booming garment industry. From the ences at Kinodvor. He started by stating that the notion of “women’s film”

“Nickelodeon boom” between 1905 and 1909 – a period that marked a pro-is usually relegated to commercial spheres and considered irrelevant to found change in how the working class spent their free time – to the lush art-house cinema, where the focus is on bringing the very best quality films Broadway theatres of the 1920s, the experience of cinema was an eye opener to both men and women of all generations. But the results of the past ten for these “Ladies of Labour”, as Thissen calls them. First, as a new means of years at the Ljubljana city cinema demonstrate that one of the key factors in socializing and entertainment and, later on, as a way for them to “participate Kinodvor’s success story were women. “If a film doesn’t work with its female in the middle-class experience”.

audiences, it doesn’t work at all”. Women are not only the art-house core audience; they are also the principle decision makers as far as maintain-With Where Were the Women? Ian Christie highlighted women’s role ing the movie-going experience is concerned.

in film history, answering his presentation’s question with “Everywhere”.

Right from the start, women were not only working as directors and writers, they were active on all levels of the new industry, though often unrecord-ed, as evidenced by the colourists responsible for Pathe’s hand-painted and stencilled films. Christie also pointed at the lack of research: “Much of the history of film spectatorship has ignored the importance of women in Bor Pleteršek is the Programme Assistant at Kinodvor Public deciding what’s made and what’s seen.” The curator and professor of Film Institution.

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“THE KEY IS THAT WE KEEP

Berit Stumpf: It was a very, very long and difficult journey to get there.

In the beginning, even at the university we were used to a climate where CHANGING PERSPECTIVES”

male directors mostly directed “pretty girls” on stage. At that time, we wanted to do something against that. We wanted to put together something where A Conversation with She She Pop

we could be authors, performers and directors, all in one. We did it, but it took a long time to be taken seriously. It was always called “the girls’ project”.

Also, it took a long time to get funding.

The 25th anniversary edition of the City of Women festival, Where do you introduce feminism? Not just on the level of rep-subtitled #HerStory, kicked off with Drawers (2012), a per-resentation and topics you bring on stage, but also in the procedures formance by the She She Pop collective, which has been op-of work. How do you work together as a collective? Do you have a hi-erating for about just as long. She She Pop was founded in erarchical structure or not? Who gives you feedback? How does your 1998 at the Giessen Institute for Applied Theatre Studies as creative process look like?

a women-only performance collective dealing with a rather misogynist state of German theatre, which has been, much Ilia Papatheodorou: The major aspect of our work is that we try to make ourselves replaceable on stage. As an actress, it is an unusual thing to think like in Slovenia, focused on universal, macro stories with that. Somebody else can take my part, and I can take theirs. This gives me predominantly male protagonists. In contrast, She She Pop the freedom to stay at home with the kids ( laughter). It also gives me the brought to the stage everyday life and autobiography as pro-freedom to sit and watch Johanna Freiburg do the same part. That’s how I cedures placed in popular culture and sociopolitical context.

learn about it.

In Drawers, women from West Berlin rummage through the Berit Stumpf: The key is that we keep changing perspectives. There is no neutral outside eye. It is always us, changing places from the inside to drawers of women who grew up on the eastern side of the the outside. Both are equally important. From the outside, you learn a lot Berlin Wall, hoping that their diaries and letters, their favour-about the performance. From the inside, you feel something different. That’s ite songs and books are going to reveal the similarities and always the key to our way of work. We keep changing the position of “the differences between them. The discussion with She She Pop director” to be able to switch sides all the time.

members Berit Stumpf, Ilia Papatheodorou and Barbara Gronau after the staging of Drawers at the 25th City of Wom-Ilia Papatheodorou: We try to make everything task-based. It’s not a prewritten role. Instead, everybody shares a task, and everybody can do it en festival was moderated by Alja Lobnik.

equally well. For example, somebody takes care of the press for a certain time, then somebody else takes on that role. We try to do that even on the level of production. We also have responsibilities in the collective, which we You are one of the very few women’s theatre collectives. How do you have to fulfil together. My dad used to say: “Well, we already learned in the persist through time and space in this rather misogynist landscape?

1970s that collectives don’t work because of the anonymous responsibility”.

And I realized that’s what we are suffering from ( laughter). We learned to Ilia Papatheodorou: Maybe outside pressure makes you stick together.

split work in mandates or tasks that we can transfer onto other people.

That’s probably one reason. It always felt good to be a separatist self that gains autonomy. We did get funded for a long time by the Berlin senate.

Berit Stumpf: Also, nobody owns anything. There is no private property.

There was some economic security grounded by that, without which we We are truly communist in this aspect. Whatever is developed, is part of the couldn’t have persisted because the state-theatre scene in Germany is very pool. Whoever feels they can use it, just uses it. There is a collective author-dominant and misogynist. The independent scene in Berlin is very open, and ship. It means Ilia develops or writes something, and I use it and make it in comparison with the rest of Europe, we get very good funding for the slightly mine.

independent scene.

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How did you find each other?

the 1990s, which washed over certain developments in the independent scene in East Berlin. Many East-German artists who were really big in the Barbara Gronau: Eight years ago, I was asked by She She Pop to take 1990s are forgotten; they were subdued by the mainstream taste. So, it would part in Drawers and rethink my East-German past ( laughter). We started by be different if we were East Germans. My question is whether we would writing letters to each other, and I became a “penfriend” with Lisa Lucas-succeed at anything at all.

sen, who is part of She She Pop as well. Before we entered the space where we rehearsed and talked about our childhood, dreams, mothers, role-models Why?

and self-understanding, we were writing weekly letters to each other about very intimate things even though we were living in the same city. The main Ilia Papatheodorou: It’s part of the wound.

question was “How did I become the woman I am now?” Also, “How did I live throughout these years?” We found out that there were some differences You mainly work with personal histories and narratives. Where between us, but also many similarities. In the performance, I present a text, does the need to be autobiographical on stage come from? Why do you compiled by different people. Mostly by Alexandra Lachmann who plays think autobiography – as a tool or a procedure – is important for you, for the same part. We were born in the same year, one in the West, the other in your collective, for this performance?

the East. We both have a brother. There were some similarities that we could share. Our characters are sitting side by side, talking about their self-under-Berit Stumpf: Not all of us are trained actors or actresses and we were standing. In the end, this role is mine, but it is also a collective role. A collec-never interested in this type of theatre. Even when we did look for starting tive East-German woman is sitting there and talking about the experiences points in classical drama texts later on, we did it very autobiographically.

of a twenty- or forty-year-old who grew up in the GDR.

Testament (2010), a piece about our fathers, was based on King Lear. It was an incredibly autobiographical telling of his story. We used Shakespeare’s Is the performance an attempt at the reunification of the East and drama as a kind of counterpoint to counterbalance the autobiographical mathe West? Were you thinking about differences and similarities between terial, because we went on the stage with our real fathers.

those two, about the stereotypes? How do you use stereotypes as a tool in theatre?

Barbara Gronau: I would not have joined Drawers if it meant learning a role which had no connection to me. As it is, I can sign under every sentence Barbara Gronau: Well, the Berlin Wall fell thirty years ago and we’re I say on the stage. I can take responsibility for what I’m saying because it has still playing this play. This is really strange because we thought that Drawers something to do with me. It comes from communication and work with you, will last for three or five years at most. The show premiered in 2012, the wall Ilia. It is a collective process I am intrinsically part of. Otherwise, I wouldn’t fell in 1989, but we still get invited to retell the story about who we are.

go to the stage – I am a theatre theorist!

Ilia Papatheodorou: Yes, about why we think the way we do. About certain conceptions and ideas that formed our identities, about the ways we think and speak, about our supposedly common language which often turns out to be quite divisive. For instance, “What do you mean when you say ‘emancipation’?” I think about something completely different when I hear that word.

The permanent members of She She Pop are Johanna Freiburg, Fanni Halmburger, Lisa Lucassen, Mieke Matzke, Ilia Papathe-Would the performance be different if She She Pop were East Ber-odorou, Berit Stumpf, Elke Weber and Sebastian Bark. In 2019, liners?

She She Pop received the prestigious Theatre-Award-Berlin for their “practice of collective authorship” and “solidary working Ilia Papatheodorou: That’s a very interesting question that we hardly practice, a feminist counter-concept to the customary struc-ever get asked. Did the Eastern and Western aesthetic merge? I don’t think tures of German municipal theatres”.

so. I think that a very dominant aesthetic discourse came from the West in 96

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Tea Hvala

form of seminal plasma (the liquid part of semen, the “jizz”). This has been

IN POSSE

developed at the Kersnikova Institute in Ljubljana where several women, trans- and non-binary people donated one of the necessary ingredients

– their blood plasma, which thus became “collective seminal plasma, or Disrupting Patriarchy with Charlotte Jarvis

‘women’s’ semen” .

The collected plasma is incorporated with other organic compounds In posse is a Latin term which means “before we are born”. It refers to during the final part of the project which re-enacts the Ancient-Greek wom-something which is possible but yet to be called into existence. In Pos-en-only festival of Thesmophoria. Very little is known about it today, but se is a work in progress by artist Charlotte Jarvis who is on a mission during her research on ritual events involving women, Jarvis found out that to make “female” sperm from her own stem cells. In 2019, the Kapelica

“Thesmophoria was the biggest festival in Ancient Greece, involving the largest number of people. It was a fertility festival in celebration of Demeter Gallery (Kersnikova Institute) invited Charlotte Jarvis to the 25th City of and Persephone, and men were not allowed to know what happened there.

Women festival where she continued her collaborative effort to shape Because of that, because of our patriarchal history, the festival is completely a new form of technological, biological and creative activism.

undocumented. I envision it as a place where people who are oppressed by patriarchy could go and celebrate.”

Throughout history, semen has been revered as a totem of literal and symbolic gendered potency. Patriarchal societies have described semen as Thesmophoria was a perfect match for Charlotte Jarvis who wanted to

“divine”, a “life force”, “a drop of the brain” and “that which sows the seeds find a joyous, celebratory and ritualistic way of making female semen with of virtue in the female soul”. In Posse aims to rewrite this cultural narrative other women. So far, performative re-enactments of the Festival of Thesmo-by joining art and science in a performative act that disrupts patriarchy.

phoria have taken place in Slovenia, the Netherlands, and the UK. On every

“Performative acts have power just by the virtue of being said or existing.

occasion, Jarvis publicly invited women, trans- and non-binary persons to And just by virtue of possessing sperm as a symbol of male power and patri-donate their blood plasma. The rest is up to them: “They decide what they archy, a woman takes away its power,” told Jarvis in a recent interview.1 “I want their Thesmophoria to be, how they want me to document it, what they don’t see this project as some kind of future utopia or dystopia in which want to share and what to retain as a secret or mystery.”

women don’t need men; I see it as an activist piece, asking what would medicine and our society be like if we hadn’t lived through all those In Ljubljana, Jarvis prepared a seed feast for the participants in Kapelica patriarchies”.

Gallery and asked them to write a manifesto about their Thesmophoria. “We spent two or three days confined in the gallery; sleeping, cooking, eating and Even though the ambitious project of making female semen is not taking making things there. Finally, we went into the woods where we mixed all the anything away from men, many of them feel threatened by it. According to ingredients and made the seminal plasma. I cannot tell you what else we did Jarvis, they say it feels like castration. In contrast, “if you ask women how in the woods. The participants asked me to document some of it, but only for they would feel if men had eggs and could have babies, many feel really the next group of women who are going to join Thesmophoria. I thought that open to the idea of sharing those roles. That’s so demonstrative about how was a beautiful idea.”

hierarchies work. You can deny the hierarchy, but emotionally you have that response because your privilege is being taken away.”

The participants also agreed on sharing some aspects of their festivities in a public performance in Kapelica Gallery which was open to women, The world’s first “female” semen is being developed in three parts. First-trans- and non-binary persons only.

ly, the artist is collaborating with Dr. Susana Chuva de Sousa Lopes at the Leiden University Medical Centre to grow sperm cells from human-induced pluripotent stem cells derived from Charlotte’s skin. Dr. Lopes has received the prestigious €1.5 million VICI grant to fund five scientists working for five years on this art-initiated project. The second part is to make a “female”

Charlotte Jarvis is an artist working at the intersection of art and science. She has exhibited in ten solo shows and over two hundred group exhibitions and performances. She is a lecturer 1 Grant Holub-Moorman and Anita Rao: “An Ancient Greek Festival for Creating Female Sperm”, at Goldsmiths University London and the Royal College of Art.

WUNC 91.5 – North Carolina Public Radio, 10 January 2020, access 29 March 2020, https://www.wunc.

org/post/ancient-greek-festival-creating-female-sperm. All the following quotes are from the same source.

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Svetlana Slapšak

al rituals. The term became a Balkan Graecism but, through the Orthodox PANSPERMIA

church ritual, passed to Moldova and Russia, too. In all these cases, the dish of cooked wheat, nuts, honey, raisins and spices in different varieties is dec-orated, usually with cross(es), covered with icing sugar and served at funerals, memorial services, Saturdays (which are the days of souls) and several other holy days, like the Serbian slava (the day of the “dead”, rather than the

“immortal” family patron saint). In Serbian, the dish is called koljivo or just žito (wheat), and it is also served in confectioneries and bakeries, usually When artist Charlotte Jarvis was looking for a celebratory, with whipped cream. At funerals, everybody has to take a spoon of the dish ritualistic way of making “female” semen with other women before leaving. This reflects the old ritual of prevention and protection from in her In Posse project, she learned about the Ancient-Greek revenge-thirsty souls, which are supposedly confused by the sharing of the women-only festival of Thesmophoria. Since ancient wom-symbolic guilt (of all living) through taking and consuming the dish, as they are confused if the people present at the funeral leave in different directions.

en’s fertility rituals involving the processing of seeds and Obviously, these ritual uses have kept the term kolyva. They are related to blood to produce life have been omitted from most histori-pre-Christian beliefs and not to church regulations, and practiced to commu-cal sources, the City of Women has asked Prof. Dr. Svetlana nicate with the souls in an obviously much older way.

Slapšak to shed some light on their transformations (and What happened to

male appropriations) through time from a classical philolo-panspermia, then? The use of kolyva

and its different versions in different languages, which all gist and feminist perspective.

relate to the same or similar material (seeds, food), similar processing (cooking) and (mostly funeral) rituals, leads to the hypothesis that the new semantic line needed a new term.

The ancient term panspermia, although perfectly composed, could not be used because of its previous semantic history.

Several ancient authors mention a meal made of all kinds of seeds, or a ritual offering of different seeds, panspermia, which has left a trace in Bal-This form of presentation does not allow for a structured argu-kan folklore, beliefs and church and funeral practices. The term itself is pre-ment and an extensive display and discussion about sources. Hence, served in a completely different semantic line since the ancient Greek philos-I will present just a few striking examples of how panspermia was opher Anaxagoras theorized about particles, seeds for forming the world.

“emptied” of its material/ritual meaning, and transferred to the dis-Many centuries later, astronomers, physicists, geologists and other scientists course of philosophers, historians, archivists and other authors in reflected and posited different theories under the same term, pansperm-a rather negative sense. Hypothetically, the reason for this is gen-ia, about the possibilities that life on Earth started with “seeds”, different der-based: a woman’s activities in the ritual social sphere were eval-life-creating materials coming to our planet with cosmic bodies, space dust uated as lower, less important and subject to ridicule. In many cul-or in other ways. At the end of the line of reason, there are also panspermic tures, anything coming from kitchen/cooking is often ridiculed. It is

“theories” about outer-space senders of seeds and their plans to the Earth the same with cooking for a ritual purpose. Here, a reference to the

... I will limit myself to the ritual aspects of panspermia and its relation to research and debates on sacrifice is necessary: beside the seminal the creation of human life, focusing on women’s rituals and on the Balkans, book by Detienne and Vernant1, Stella Georgoudi has done a lot ancient and modern.

of work on the topic.2 The leading line of interpretation separates The semantic history of the word panspermia and its synonym kolyva is crucial to understanding the points in which the change of term also meant 1 Marcel Détienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, La cuisine du sacrifice en pays grec (Paris: Gallimard, the change in practices. The second term comes from the ancient Greek word 1979).

2  Stella Georgoudi, Renée Koch Piettre and Francis Schmidt (eds.), La cuisine et l’autel. Les sacrifices for a small coin, which then changed to “small cakes made of cooked wheat”: en questions dans les sociétés de la Méditerranée ancienne (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005); S. Georgoudi, “Les such offerings were common for the gods of the Underworld and in funer-Douze Dieux des Grecs: variation sur un thème”, in St. Georgoudi, J.-P. Vernant (eds.), Mythes grecs au figuré (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 43–80.

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bloody sacrifice from the vegetal (aromatic or cooked): the first is an sprouts which they had forced from seeds for a certain time act of great importance for the political and religious coherence of in broken pots wither away. Without men, they celebrate the the polis (state), the second remains among the rituals of the other shortcomings of masculine sexuality, symbolized by Aphro-kind, sometimes taken to the polis level, but usually not. Since wom-dite’s lover Adonis.

en were not citizens, their participation was minor.

The crucial link between blood, bones and seeds entailing the Panspermia had been used in the negative context since Aristoteles.

creation of life is to be found in Aristophanes’ comedy Thesmopho-The atomists, like Anaxagoras, used panspermia as an important theoretical riazousae (Women at the Festival of Thesmophoria), which, however, term.3 Aristoteles was changing the meaning,4 but eventually the negative does not mention panspermia as such even though seed cakes (pre-meaning of “mixture of everything/anything” has prevailed. Maybe the best pared in a different form, that of snakes and phalloi) were typical example of this change of meaning is given by Lucian, in his philosophi-for the festivals of Thesmophoria and Haloe, which took place in cal dialogue with Hermotimos,5 where he gives a visual image of the ini-late autumn, during harvest time. Panspermia, on the other hand, is tial choice a philosopher has to make between schools of thinking. The first prepared for the Pyanepsia festival: this ritual is connected to the image is a comparison between choosing a philosophical school and testing myth of the founder, consecrated to Theseus, and the story of his re-the wine from a large recipient. Taking a small amount from a large con-turn to Athens from Crete where he killed Minotaur and thus saved tainer possibly gives a core of the way of thinking, but much more testing is the children intended as a sacrifice to the monster. In order to thank necessary to get a good grasp of the whole. A different approach is taking a Apollo, they prepared an improvised meal of everything they had, small quantity of grains which are in layers in a big container: it is an arbi-panspermia, ate it together and sacrificed it to the god too. Since this trary choice, without any idea of structure or meaning. The two images obvi-sacrifice included only the saved boys, I see it as a contamination or ously come from the marketplace. In the imaginary cognitive process, wine appropriation of a ritual. Myths about founders, which are younger with its unified texture is privileged, while different grains (preparation for and important for the state ideology, often “steal” older stories and panspermia?) are deprivileged. “Some kind of panspermia,” as Lucian puts rituals: the formula about the intelligence to survive (Gr. metis) is it, corresponds with many expressions in many languages in which mixed very popular and the plot-bearer in Homer’s Odyssey. Boys’ cooking elements make a funny meal, metaphorically a mess.

is a “jump” in the formula, which serves the myth of the founder –

and makes the storytelling more attractive. In other words, I believe But mixing itself is crucial in the ritual; it means that dif-that panspermia is misplaced here, maybe to undermine the well-ferent seeds, or seeds in general, have the power of connect-known women’s ritual and to give it a masculine attire in polis.

ing life and death and creating life. Apparently, they do not need any other force to germinate and to work in the space In Thesmophoriazousae, Aristophanes avoids the details of the between life and death. The self-recreating force of seeds, ritual – cooking, seeds and everything, because his main line of in-which is pushed back to the world of women and their rituals, terpretation is that men, because of the war they are instigating, does not contain anything masculine. Some of these elements have become women in the worst sense. To ridicule men, he pre-can be recognized in the high summer festival of Adonia, sents women as true citizens who engage in a rational democracy.

during which women dress and make up in a seductive way He also reverses gender roles in quoting Euripides’ texts, and fi-and spend a night on the rooftops joking and feasting, while nally, makes men dress like women. Therefore, the whole female behaviour is represented as male. But the main ritual is preserved in the comedy – it is in fact a parody of the ritual.

3 Walter Burkert, Kleine Schriften VIII: Philosophica, edited by Thomas Alexander Szlezák and Karl-Heinz Stanzel (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001).

4 Ibidem.

Mnesilochos, Euripides’ relative who spies on women during the 5 Hermotimos, Lucian 61:

festival to help Euripides, who may become the object of women’s ὅρα τοίνυν μὴ τῷδε μᾶλλον φιλοσοφία ἔοικεν: ὁ μὲν γὰρ πίθος ἔτι μενέτωσοὶ καὶ ὁ κάπηλος, ἐνέστω

vengeance for his writing about them, is demasked by women. Par-

δὲ μὴ οἶνος, ἀλλὰ πανσπερμία τις, πυρὸςὑπεράνω καὶ μετὰ τοῦτον κύαμοι, εἶτα κριθαὶ καὶ ὐπὸ ταύταις

odying one of Euripides’ plays, he grabs a baby from the arms of a φακοί, εἶταἐρέβινθοι καὶ ἄλλα ποικίλα. πρόσει δὴ σὺ ὠνήσασθαι ἐθέλων τῶνσπερμάτων, καὶ ὃς ἀφελὼν

τοῦ πυροῦ, οὗπερ ἦν, ἀνέδωκέ σοι δεῖγμα ἐς τὴνχεῖρα, ὡς ἴδοις, ἆρα οὖν ἔχοις ἂν εἰπεῖν εἰς ἐκεῖνο

woman and threatens to slaughter it. While unwrapping the baby, he ἀποβλέπων εἰ καὶ οἱἐρέβινθοι καθαροὶ καὶ οἱ φακοὶ εὐτακεῖς καὶ οἱ κύαμοι οὐ διάκενοι.

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REPRESENTATION

discovers that the baby is in fact a wine skin and in a hilarious scene he cuts it, so that the wine splashes while the “mother” tries to save the “blood” into a recipient. The reversal is perfect, because it points to women’s alcoholism, a popular topic of ridiculing and maybe a real problem.6 On a different level of meaning, this is a parody of the main ritual at the festival: women would kill a pig (which in Greek is a common metonymy for female genitalia), cut it to pieces and leave in a pit to decompose. Later, the remains would be mixed with seeds into the soil to fertilize it.

Wine is the replacement for blood in many rituals, not only in Greek antiquity. The connection of blood/bones and seeds to form of a new life is unique. The main feature of such insemination is in fact the mixing of (female – pig) blood/body parts and seeds without other agents. The male element is present only in a symbolic form (cakes in form of genitalia). I would like to posit a base for further research, mostly in ancient texts: panspermia as an old, contaminated and appropriated ritual, understood as a prehistory of processing seeds in fertility rituals, done by women; the mixing of blood/

body parts to produce life.



6  In antiquity, women were drinking in secret, having the access to home reserves, without mixing wine with water and not as a social habit.

Prof. Dr. Svetlana Slapšak is the former Dean of Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis and a prolific writer of fiction, essays, studies and columns. Informed by classical philology and an-thropology, her research is focused on women’s cultures in the Balkans – from Ancient Greece, through romanticism, to the conflicts of the 1990s and the present day.

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LIST OF PHOTOGRAPHS

NINA DRAGIČEVIĆ: Extensions of Pleasure

Sound installation, 2019, photo: Nada Žgank, p. 82-83.

BARBARA KAPELJ, LEJA JURIŠIĆ, TEJA REBA, MIA HABIB: ANA ČIGON: Cheers to Women! A Performative Appetizer to Video Art I’m Walking Behind You and Watching You

Performance, 2020, photo: Nada Žgank, p. 85. The sign says Rise up or Die.

Performance/Guided tour, 2013, photo collage: Nada Žgank, p. 4–5.

ZVONKA T SIMČIČ: Lesbian Kiss

ALICJA ROGALSKA: The Aliens Act

Performance, 2000, video stills: Goran Hođić, p. 89.

Video screening, 2019, photo: Nada Žgank, p. 9.

FREDERIKE MIGOM: Binti

ALICJA ROGALSKA: The Aliens Act

Film screening, 2019, photo: Nada Žgank, p. 92-93.

Portrait series, 2019, photos: Lara Žitko, p. 12–23.

SHE SHE POP: Drawers

MARIJA MOJCA PUNGERČAR: Singer

Performance, 2019, photo: Nada Žgank, p. 98-99.

Installation, 2003, photo: Nada Žgank, p. 35.

CHARLOTTE JARVIS: In Posse

MILIJANA BABIĆ: Looking for Work

Performance, 2019, photo: Nada Žgank, p. 102-103, 109.

Action, 2011, photo: Mirna Kutleša, p. 36-37.

SILVIA FEDERICI: The Return of Primitive Accumulation and the Ongoing War Against Women

Lecture, 2014, photo: Nada Žgank, p. 43.

LIST OF SOURCES

KRISTINA LEKO: Cheese and Cream Project

Video installation stills, channel 3, 2002–2003, photo collage: Kristina Leko, p. 51.

ZALA DOBOVŠEK: “Sine Nataše Živković in No. 1 Lane Zdravković / Kitch na Mestu

ELISABETH SUBRIN: Shulie

žensk” , Dnevnik, 8 October 2018, access 4 April 2020, emphasis added by T. Hvala, KATJA ČIČIGOJ, TANJA RENER: Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex p. 68.

Film screening/Book presentation, 2019, photo: Nada Žgank, p. 58-59.

MAJA ŠUČUR: “Florentina Holzinger, plesalka in koreografinja: Znate leteti? Potem

VESNA BUKOVEC: #8MarchEveryDay

ste naše” , Dnevnik, 9 October 2019, access 7 May 2020, p. 70-71.

Drawings, 2020, p. 60-61, 63.

FLORA DÉTRAZ: “Muyte Maker” , artist statement, City of Women, 2019, access 7 May NATAŠA ŽIVKOVIĆ: Sonny

2020, p. 72.

Performance, 2019, photo: Nada Žgank, p. 69.

URBAN BELINA: “Upehane feministične strategije Golega življenja” , Neodvisni, 11

FLORENTINA HOLZINGER: TANZ

October 2019, access 29 March 2020, p. 74-75.

Performance, 2019, photo: Nada Žgank, p. 70-71.

ROK VEVAR, AMELIA KRAIGHER: “Upornice, artistke, mazohistke” , Večer, 16

FLORA DÉTRAZ: Muyte Maker

October 2007, access 4 April 2020, p. 76.

Performance, 2019, photo: Nada Žgank, p. 72-73.

NINA DRAGIČEVIĆ: “Extensions of Pleasure” , artist statement, City of Women, 2019, OLJA GRUBIĆ: Naked Life

access 7 May 2020, p. 82.

Performance, 2019, photo: Marcandrea, p. 74-75.

BARA KOLENC: Brina

Performance, 2019, photo: Nada Žgank, p. 76-77.

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CITY OF WOMEN

Reflecting 2019/2020

Published by: Mesto žensk – Društvo za promocijo

žensk v kulturi / City of Women – Association for

the Promotion of Women in Culture

Editor: Tea Hvala

Photo editor: Nada Žgank

Transcriptions: Judita Corn, Ivana Maričić

Translations: Jedrt Lapuh Maležič

Language editing: Sonja Benčina

Graphic design: Vesna Bukovec

Published on 25 May 2020 in Ljubljana, Slovenia

Electronic edition

Available in pdf at

cityofwomen.org/en/content/publications

Published with the support of the Ministry of

Culture and the City of Ljubljana.

Kataložni zapis o publikaciji (CIP) pripravili v Narodni in univerzitetni knjižnici v Ljubljani

COBISS.SI-ID=15894787

ISBN 978-961-93888-5-3 (pdf)